Asthma drug combo or increase in steroid doses can bring improvement

Children with asthma and continuing to experience the disease symptoms and making use of use of low-dose inhaled corticosteroids can find benefit by or adding one of two asthma drugs or increasing the dosage.

Results of the study, called BADGER (Best ADd-on therapy Giving Effective Responses) can help physicians in predicting, in a better way, as to which of the options would help a patient the most.

From Sciencedaily.com:

Surprisingly, researchers determined several factors that had no influence on a drug's effectiveness, including age, gender, allergies, bronchodilator response, recent exacerbations or several other tests.

"We used a few complicated and expensive tests we thought would help us determine which drug would be better, but they didn't help, so we can avoid these tests," says Strunk, the Donald Strominger Professor of Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine.

Although 98 percent of patients in the study showed improvement on at least one of the step-up options, there were still 120 asthma exacerbations, or attacks, among the 165 patients that required treatment with prednisone, a corticosteroid commonly used after an exacerbation that prevents the release of inflammatory substances in the body. Bacharier says that indicates none of these treatments provide perfect asthma control.

"There may not be an ideal therapy for every patient, but these step-up treatments allow for improved asthma control and outcomes over leaving them on low-dose steroids alone," Bacharier says.

Robert C. Strunk, M.D., and Leonard B. Bacharier, M.D., both Washington University pediatric asthma specialists at St. Louis Children's Hospital, were coauthors on the study, published online March 2, 2010, by the New England Journal of Medicine.