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 Asthma and Obesity:
Bizarre Bedfellows or Causal Co-morbidities?
"Overweight and obesity may soon cause as much preventable disease and death as cigarette smoking... People tend to think of overweight and obesity as strictly a personal matter, but there is much that communities can and should do to address these problems."
-David Satcher,MD
The Surgeon General?s Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity, 2001"
The Twin Peaks of Asthma and Obesity
 Asthma and obesity1 have become increasingly common in Oregon and elsewhere in the U.S., and each has become commonly recognized as a public health concern. In 2001, 7.9% of Oregon adults 18 to 55 reported having current asthma. During the same time, 36.3% of Oregonians aged 18 to 55 were overweight, 17.7% were obese, and 3.0% were extremely obese. There were substantial differences in the prevalence these conditions between men and women (Figure 1).
Nationwide, the prevalence of obesity has increased significantly since the 1970s, and the prevalence of asthma has followed a similar path since the 1980s.2 Many experts consider each condition an epidemic. This raises a question: could these trends be related to one another? In this publication, we review the evidence for such a relationship.
1. A person is obese if his or her BMI (body mass index) is equal to or greater than 30 (kg/m2). By these criteria, a 5'4" person who weighed 174 or more pounds would be obese. Extreme obesity, defined as BMI equal to or greater than 40, corresponds to a 5'4" person weighing over 232 pounds.
Conversely, a 5'4" person who weighed 108 to 145 pounds would be considered normal.
2. It should be noted that these trends may have begun even earlier - these dates only indicate when they first began to be measured on a population-wide, consistent basis.
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