A study of nearly 300 patients with mild persistent asthma found that inhaled steroids—long considered the gold standard for asthma treatment—were no more effective than placebo in nearly three-fourths of the study patients, all over age 12. Inhaled steroids were better than placebo for a subset of the patients who had high levels of a particular type of inflammatory cells, called eosinophils, in their sputum, but they represented about a fourth of patients enrolled in the trial.
The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health, and appeared online on May 19 in the New England Journal of Medicine(NEJM). The research highlights the need for developing more effective treatments for asthma and suggests that it may be possible to target particular therapies to subsets of patients, such as those with high or low…
