Asthma

Free asthma screenings will be offered in May around the country, including several in Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology . Allergists encourage anyone who has breathing problems such as coughing, wheezing or shortness of breath or uncontrolled asthma to attend a screening. This year, the Nationwide Asthma Screening Program includes a special initiative to identify people who have difficulty breathing during or immediately after exercise and may have a condition called exercise-induced bronchoconstriction.

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.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday issued its strongest warning against the use of a drug prescribed off-label to prevent preterm labor, saying it appears to be ineffective at delaying premature births and poses serious health risks for pregnant woman who take it for longer than 72 hours. The warning comes less than two weeks after the FDA approved a new drug , called Makena, to reduce the risk of premature delivery. One in eight babies born in the U.S. each year -- 543,000 -- is born prematurely, says the March of Dimes . Terbutaline , commercially marketed as Brethine and Bricanyl, is a drug approved for the treatment of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, sometimes called emphysema.

Families who eat dinner at home together tend to have more nourishing meals, but there may be other health benefits as well. A study finds that having quality family interactions at mealtime was linked with better overall health for children with asthma. Family meals were recorded via video for 200 families with children age 5 to 12 who had persistent asthma. Researchers noted how the families spent their time together and found most time was spent either in activity (talking on the phone, watching television)

Air filters will be installed in more than 40 Wilmington-area schools in an effort to alleviate asthma linked to pollution from the Port of Los Angeles, air quality officials announced Tuesday. The $5.4-million contract is part of a landmark 2008 settlement between environmental groups and the city of L.A., after community opposition threatened to halt a $274-million terminal expansion at the port. The settlement, negotiated by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Coalition for a Safe Environment and other groups, led to the creation last October of a $50-million trust fund for Wilmington and San Pedro to offset the effects of pollution from the movement of goods.

Even as a high-profile panel of experts recently disputed the conventional wisdom that Americans don't get enough vitamin D -- and that vitamin D deficiencies create greater risk of disease -- new research shows that newborns with low levels of vitamin D have higher rates of respiratory infection and wheezing than infants born with more vitamin D in their systems. There was no correlation, however, between low vitamin D levels and asthma. The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, expanded on earlier work by Dr. Carlos Camargo of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston that had shown that babies born to mothers who took vitamin D supplements were less likely to develop wheezing during childhood.

LONDON -- Occupational asthma is causing substantial financial losses to government and health agencies, says a study published in the medical journal Thorax and reported in the British press this week. The analysis discovered that chemicals commonly linked to work-related cases were identified as isocyanates, latex and biocides (e.g., glutaraldehyde) or flour, present in materials like adhesives, wood dust, spray paints and foam molding. The economic cost reaches more than $213 million each year.

Warning: Facebook could be hazardous to your health. So says a team of Italian physicians writing in the Nov. 20 edition of the British medical journal Lancet . They describe the case of an 18-year-old man whose asthma had been in check until he logged on to the social networking site and discovered that his ex-girlfriend had gotten over him and become Facebook friends with several other potential suitors. Apparently, the patient took the break-up rather hard, leaving him in a “depressive state,” according to the report.

Are children who have asthma allowed to take their meds when they go to school? Now they are, but it's complicated. It wasn't until 2010 that the last of the 50 states (North Dakota) enacted legislation for what's sometimes referred to as "self-carry" laws, according to the Allergy & Asthma Network Mothers of Asthmatics . But laws vary from state to state, some requiring the child to have a letter from a doctor. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a roundup of some legislation by state .)

Spiriva, a drug that is already widely used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, can provide significant relief of symptoms for adult asthmatics who have difficulty obtaining relief with other drugs, researchers said Sunday. Some physicians have already begun prescribing the drug for asthmatics because of the lack of suitable alternatives, but the new results from a major clinical trial provide a sound underpinning for such uses, experts said. In particular, the drug is expected to provide an alternative to long-acting beta-agonists, such as Serevent, Advair and Symbicort, which have been shown occasionally to exacerbate asthma symptoms, leading to hospitalization and even death.