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Sunday, February 22, 2004A new study finds aspirin can trigger an asthma attack in about one in five adults with the disease. ..."We have found a higher than previously thought figure for sensitivity to aspirin and aspirin-related drugs in asthmatics," says co-researcher Dr. John Costello, a clinical director of medicine at King's College Hospital in London. But others say the researchers are attaching more significance to their findings than they deserve: However, Dr. Russell B. Leftwich, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University and a spokesman for the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology, says he believes the British researchers 'overestimate the frequency of aspirin sensitivity.' 'It is not reasonable to assume that the subjects in those articles they collected were a representative cross-section of asthma sufferers,' he says. Dr. Rand A. Malone, another academy spokesman, adds that 'in most patients, the degree of fall in lung function occurs so slowly that most people don't even know that it is happening, and the episode resolves without therapy in the vast majority of patients.' Aspirin, he says, probably does cause slight tightness in a lot of asthmatics, but clinically significant symptoms are so rare that 'we have given up warning people routinely about the association.' 'Breathing cold air, laughing hard or breathing secondhand smoke all cause asthmatics to feel tightness much more frequently and probably more dramatically than aspirin,' Malone says. Judging by the study these are valid criticisms. For one thing, it was one of those studies that just collected a bunch of other papers and sifted through the data looking for stasticial trends. For another, there was a marked difference between objectively measured changes in asthma and subjectively felt changes: The prevalence of aspirin induced asthma was highest when determined by oral provocation testing (adults 21%, 95% confidence interval 14% to 29%; children 5%, 0% to 14%) than by verbal history (adults 3%, 2% to 4%; children 2%, 1% to 3%). So, if you asked someone with asthma whether they felt aspirin made their condition worse, most of them would say "no," even though there might be measurably small differences in their pulmonary function. NOTE: This isn't to be confused with Samter's syndrome, which is a real allergic reaction to aspirin in people who also have asthma and nasal polyps. posted by Sydney on 2/22/2004 11:09:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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