People with asthma: care during the COVID-19 pandemic and the importance of regular exercise for the immune system

ABSTRACT

Abstract Aim: To show the possible immunologic pathways of protection for asthmatics against infection of Covid-19 through the capacity of recognition and cytotoxicity to eliminate pathogens improved by regular exercise aerobic. Methods: The bibliographic search was conducted on the following databases Pubmed/Medline, Scielo, and Scholar Google from 2020 to 2021. The following keywords and Boolean operators were used asthma, aerobic training (AT), immune system, and Covid-19. Results: After the screening, 349 were initially found, after evaluation only 20 studies had all criteria. Twelve studies showed that AT induces changes in the immune system with a reduction of inflammation. In complement, the literature showed an innate pathway that improves immune function against COVID-19 by reducing angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) in the lung, which seems to hinder the multiplication of the COVID-19 virus in the lung. Apparently, asthmatics patients are less susceptible to respiratory infection caused by COVID-19 because they have low levels of ACE2. Furthermore, trained asthmatics showed a lower risk of infection for SARS-CoV-2. Conclusion: The findings reported that asthmatics people can benefit from AT, and these individuals seem not to be a risk group for covid-19 because they have low levels of ACE2 protein. Taken together, this review reinforces the importance of asthmatic patients be physically active throughout their lifetime, but specially during the pandemic to prevent contamination by SARS-CoV-2.