Asthma

Asthma sufferers have long relied on inhalers for relief from wheezing or coughing attacks. But as of Dec. 31, Primatene Mist -- the only available over-the-counter asthma inhaler -- was taken off shelves because of its adverse effect on the environment. Other inhalers are available, but these require a doctor's prescription. Some people with asthma aren't happy about the change, but lung doctors and asthma specialists agree that Primatene Mist wasn't the best option for patients anyway.

Reporting from New York -- Anthony Shadid, a journalist who gave voice to those muffled by the turmoil around them — from Iraqi families enveloped in civil war to young Libyans spurred to take up arms against a dictator — died while doing just that: reporting from Syria in defiance of official attempts to limit media coverage of the bloodshed there. Shadid, who died Thursday at 43, was stricken by an apparent asthma attack while preparing to leave Syria with his New York Times colleague, photographer Tyler Hicks.

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid died Thursday after suffering an apparent asthma attack while on assignment in Syria.  He was 43 years old. According to an Associated Press report, New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks, who was traveling with Shadid, said that thePulitzer Prize-winningreporter had also suffered a bout a week earlier. The attack Thursday was more severe: Shadid reportedly lost consciousness and collapsed.  His breathing became “very faint” and “very shallow,” Hicks said, and ceased completely after a few minutes.

The study of how bodies develop immunities has become important to every medical speciality and additional courses in the field are needed in medical schools, physicians urged in a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. "The future holds great promise for the allergy and clinical immunology," wrote Dr. John E. Salvaggio of Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans and Dr. K. Frank Austen of the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

About 4 million adult Americans with a mild form of asthma may not need to take daily steroid doses, but instead can use the drug only as needed to control symptoms, says a new study supported by the National Institutes of Health. The change would make drug use more convenient, minimize side effects from the powerful drugs and possibly save the nation as much as $2 billion per year, the study concludes.

Famously overweight New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was hospitalized Thursday morning after having trouble breathing.  When his EKG, blood work and chest X-ray came back normal, doctors at the Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, N.J., diagnosed an asthma attack. The rising Republican star has spoken often about his struggles with his weight, even telling CNN talk show host Piers Morgan that he felt "guilty" about it, the Los Angeles Times reported.  He has also talked publicly about living with asthma.  The subject comes up often when he's stumping about healthcare.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the fiscal conservative cites the cost of his asthma medication when expounding on the "generosity of the state health care plan.

An infection of the uterine cavity during pregnancy combined with premature birth doubles the risk that an African American child will develop asthma, researchers have found. The combination also increases risk for some other ethnicities, though less severely. About 8% of pregnancies are marked by such bacterial infections, called chorioamnionitis, but it is not yet clear what proportion of asthma is induced by them, said the lead author, Dr. Darios Getahun of Kaiser Permanente's Department of Research and Evaluation in Pasadena.

I have used Pycnogenol for almost two years for horrible hot flashes and night sweats. I started with 200 milligrams. It did stop the symptoms, but it felt like I was trying to restart an old engine. I dropped the dose to 150 mg and found that is a good dose for me. The flashes and sweats are minimal and tolerable. An unexpected and welcome side effect is that my asthma is so much better. I was on Symbicort, maximum dosage, and could not wean myself off. I realized my asthma was better after using the Pycnogenol for a short while, and I tried to taper down again.

Linda Roach Monroe's article "Kids and Asthma" (Aug. 8) should be extended to physicians across the country. I am extremely disappointed and concerned that there is so little research being done on asthma. There is so much controversy and disagreement on its treatment, yet we are not compelled to find an answer. There are many precautions and preventions of attacks that physicians are not communicating to their patients. It's about time someone has attempted to distribute this information to all doctors.

A large number of the world's 300 million people with asthma -- as many as 40% -- don't respond to the inhalers their doctors prescribe to improve lung function.  But doctors don't know how to predict which patients will benefit from glucocorticoid therapy (steroid inhalers) and which ones won't. But researchers at the Harvard Medical School have now located a genetic variation that may some day help physicians figure it out. The team's results, published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine, used a genome-wide analysis of 118 trios (consisting of a child and his or her parents)

The daily battle ceased at the LaSalle household in Moreno Valley when Kailyn came back from her first camp last summer. Called Camp NoMoWheezin and operated by the California chapter of the Asthma & Allergy Foundation of America, the facility is for children ages 8 to 14 with asthma. When Kailyn first visited, she was 11 and had been struggling with chronic asthma her whole life, as well as with allergies to things such as dust, horses, pollen and grass. The constant stress of Kailyn's condition took a toll.

Famously overweight New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was hospitalized Thursday morning after having trouble breathing.  When his EKG, blood work and chest X-ray came back normal, doctors at the Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, N.J., diagnosed an asthma attack. The rising Republican star has spoken often about his struggles with his weight, even telling CNN talk show host Piers Morgan that he felt "guilty" about it, the Los Angeles Times reported.  He has also talked publicly about living with asthma.  The subject comes up often when he's stumping about healthcare.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the fiscal conservative cites the cost of his asthma medication when expounding on the "generosity of the state health care plan.

Children who are born at a very low birth weight typically have more chronic health problems than normal birth weight children. While those issues don't appear to get worse as they become teenagers, a study finds, they may be at higher risk for obesity. The study, released Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. , focused on 181 extremely low birth weight children (whose weight at birth was less than 2.2 pounds on average) and 115 normal birth weight children born between 1992 and 1995.

Breastfeeding has a long list of demonstrated benefits, including a lower risk of diarrhea, skin rash, respiratory infections and a type of deadly gastrointestinal disease. Now, new research affirms that warding off asthma symptoms still belongs on that list . Researchers in the Netherlands used questionnaires to assess the breastfeeding history and asthma symptoms in more than 5,000 preschool children. The children who had never been breastfed were more likely to wheeze, cough, have shortness of breath and have persistent mucus than children who were breastfed for six months.

The placebo effect is alive and well, at least for patients with acute asthma. That's the finding of a pilot study funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine -- part of the National Institutes of Health -- and published in Thursday's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers from Harvard Medical School and colleagues decided to test the placebo effect in asthma patients because it's easy to assess their physical improvement (as measured by lung function tests)

Your child has been diagnosed as having asthma. Now what? Knowing the signs of an attack is the key to controlling little Susie or Devon's asthma. About 14 million to 15 million Americans have the chronic respiratory disorder, and about one-third of them are children. Normally, the airways are open. But in people with asthma, exposure to an allergen or something in the environment can lead to inflammation, increased mucus production and shortness of breath.

Children raised on farms don't suffer from asthma as much as their city- and suburb-dwelling counterparts, according to a paper published online Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. But it's not necessarily because of the fresh air, full sun and hard work, researchers say -- it's because of the germs. Scientists had known that many of the things associated with farm life -- unpasteurized milk, exposure to animals such as cows and pigs, and hay -- helped kids grow up with stronger constitutions, perhaps because they were being exposed to harmless, even beneficial, bacteria along the way. To test this hypothesis, the researchers analyzed samples of house dust to look at the microbes within.

Southern California air-quality regulators are sponsoring an in-depth study to determine if the San Bernardino Rail Yard, a major inland hub of goods shipped across the U.S., has caused an increase in cancer and asthma in the neighboring low-income communities. The study comes two years after the California Air Resources Board determined that diesel emissions from locomotives, big-rigs and other equipment at the facility posed a significant health risk to thousands of residents living near the site, and that the facility posed the greatest cancer risk of any rail yard in California.

Asthma pills appear to work just as well as inhaled steroids at relieving asthma symptoms in real-life settings, researchers have found, apparently because people prefer swallowing a pill to sticking something up their nose. In one clinical trial, asthma sufferers who took as a first-line therapy the oral medications Singulair or Accolate , each a brand of leukotriene-receptor antagonists, reported as much symptom relief on a quality-of-life survey at two months as those who used an inhaled glucocorticoid, according to a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.