Description: Overweight and obese individuals are 50 percent more likely to develop asthma than normal-weight men and women, new research suggests.

Public health efforts to control asthma should therefore emphasize the importance of healthy weight management, the researchers argue in the April issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

"The bottom-line is that being overweight appears to significantly increase the risk of asthma," said study co-author Dr. E. Rand Sutherland, of the National Jewish Medical and Research Center (NJMRC) in Denver. "But the caveat is, that until further studies are done, it won't be clear exactly what type or severity of asthma is present in obese people."

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, asthma is an incurable but usually controllable chronic disease involving inflammation and narrowing of the airways that carry oxygen into and out of the lungs.

The disease typically pro