Perspectives
Do the benefits of daily inhaled steroid treatment of mild asthma outweigh the risks?
University of Southern Denmark, Kolding Hospital, Denmark
Correspondence to:
Søren Pedersen, Paediatric Research Unit, Kolding Hospital, DK-6000 Kolding, Denmark; spconsult@post1.tele.dk
Accepted 10 January 2008
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The benefits of maintenance therapy with inhaled corticosteroids have been convincingly established in patients with moderate and severe asthma disease, but only recently have studies assessed the potential benefits for children with mild disease. In this issue of Archives of Disease in Childhood, Turpeinen and colleagues report the findings of such a study.1 Their results confirmed that continuous treatment with inhaled corticosteroids is associated with significantly better asthma control than with treatment with disodium cromoglycate or intermittent treatment with inhaled corticosteroids. However, better asthma control was achieved at the expense of some reduction in annual growth. These findings corroborate the results of earlier, differently designed, much larger and longer studies on around 3000 children with mild asthma.2–4 So, there is good evidence that optimal or near optimal asthma control can be achieved in most children with mild asthma with inhaled corticosteroids. Furthermore, inhaled corticosteroids are clinically more effective and
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