Mild asthma patients `may not need daily steroids`

Washington - Asthmatics who inhale the low-dose steroid medicine to reduce inflammation as a daily routine do no better than those who turn to their inhalers only when they have symptoms, a new study has suggested.

According to the researchers, the findings suggest a different, personalized, and far less expensive approach to treating the common inflammatory condition.

In effect, the study challenges national and international guidelines that have been in place for 20 years.

According to those recommendations, if a person’s asthma is mild but persistent, he or she should take an inhaled steroid every day to suppress airway inflammation and reduce the risk of exacerbations.

Mild persistent asthma is one of four types of the disease, which affects as many as one in every 12 people in the United States, according to federal statistics.

“Daily treatment with an inhaled corticosteroid has long been believed to be the best treatment for mild persistent asthma, but it is not followed by the majority of patients,” senior author Homer A. Boushey, MD, a UCSF professor of medicine in the division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, said.

A pioneer in the field who has been involved in asthma research for 40 years, Boushey served on the expert committee that developed the current National Institutes of Health’s guidelines for managing the disease.

“People don’t seem to like taking this type of treatment every day – just a third of the inhaler prescriptions are renewed even once,” Boushey said.

“So we wondered what would happen if people with mild asthma already well controlled by daily treatment with an inhaled corticosteroid instead took a puff only when they used their rescue medication – usually albuterol -- for relief of symptoms,” he added.

The upshot: patients who took inhaled corticosteroid only when they had symptoms wound up using half as much of the medication but did not have more severe symptoms. Nor did they miss more days of work or school, or have more flare-ups.

Called the Best Adjustment Strategy for Asthma in the Longer Term trial (BASALT), the study involved a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial conducted by the Asthma Clinical Research Network at 10 academic medical centers across the country including UCSF and the University of Texas Medical Branch.

Altogether, 342 adults with mild to moderate, persistent asthma took part in the study over nine months between 2007 and 2010. All were diagnosed by physicians and all had either reversible airflow limitation or airway hyperresponsiveness.

In each case, the participant’s asthma was under control due to low-dose inhaled corticosteroids.

The report is set to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.