Asthma is common. It’s known to be one of the leading chronic diseases worldwide and it’s responsible for a large proportion of annual hospitalizations. In the USA alone 20 million people are said to suffer from asthma and 2 million visits to the emergency room are caused by the condition each year. This is one country with relatively high levels of medical treatment available, in parts of the world which aren’t so fortunate asthma remains a dangerous killer.
Traditionally asthma is treated with two medicines. These are the preventative medicine and the ‘rescue’ inhaler. The former is used to maintain the health of the patient’s lungs, lessening any general swelling or degradation and easing their symptoms in their day to day lives. The latter is used when the asthmatic patients’ symptoms take a turn for the worse, their airways may start to close up or they may start wheezing. The rescue inhaler contains medication which should immediately relieve these symptoms but will have no long term curative effect.
The traditional treatment for asthma is effective and saves lives but scientists and researchers are always looking to push forwards and make lives easier. For this reason a whole host of studies into the use of a single inhaler which does the job of both the preventative and the rescue medicines. The idea is to make the whole treatment of asthma much simpler and ease the amount that patients will have to remember and/or carry around for them.
The studies used groups of asthmatics who were trying the new treatment and groups who weren’t. It was found that though the new inhaler didn’t show any massive improvements in hospitalization rates it did work just as effectively as the old treatment. So the dual purpose inhaler could indeed make the lives of patients with asthma much easier in the years to come as one is always easier to manage than two!
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