As per a new review of recent studies, a combination of drugs for airway opening and inhaled steroids with inflammation-reducing properties are better option than a normal dose of steroids when it comes to inhibiting severe asthma attacks.
It was suggested during the view that higher doses of steroids can prove to be an amicable option as part of a combination therapy for reducing the occurrence of asthma attacks.
From News-Medical.Net:
Asthma patients who used both LABA medication and an inhaled steroid were significantly less likely to have a severe asthma flare-up requiring treatment with an injected or swallowed steroid than patients taking the steroid alone, according to Muireann Ni Chroinin, M.D., of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital in England, and colleagues.
The reviews appear in the current issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing medical trials on a topic.
The rate of severe attacks dropped from 27 percent to 22 percent in patients taking the combination therapy. Ni Chroinin and colleagues calculate that 18 patients would need to be treated with LABA for one year to prevent at least one patient from having such an attack.
Jerry Krishnan, M.D., an asthma researcher and assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said that he feels that there is a tendency to initiate combination therapy with LABAs (long acting beta-2 agonists) and inhaled corticosteroids with most of the medical practitioners.
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