Asthma, Rhinitis, other Respiratory DiseasesRhinitis therapy and the prevention of hospital care for asthma: A case-control study
Section snippets
Data source
The study population of patients with both allergic rhinitis and asthma was selected from a northeastern United States, commercial, managed-care organization with approximately 215,000 enrollees. The plan maintains extensive and comprehensive computerized records containing administrative, medical, and pharmacy claims for their membership. Diagnoses (recorded with the use of ICD-9 codes), procedures, laboratory tests, physician visits, emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and pharmacy
Demographics
Three hundred sixty-one patients were treated in the emergency room and/or hospitalized for exacerbations of asthma and were matched to 1444 control patients (TABLE I, Table II). Case patients used more antiasthma medications and had received more hospital care for asthma exacerbations during the year before the index month than did the control group.
Asthma-related emergency room visits
The results of the crude and multivariate analyses for asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations are shown in Table III. Use of
Discussion
These results suggest that treatment of allergic rhinitis reduces the risk of emergency room visits and hospitalizations for asthma. To our knowledge, this is the first case-control study to show such a relation.
A recently published cohort study reported that composite exposure of nasal corticosteroids or second-generation antihistamines was associated with a reduction in the composite outcome of hospitalization or emergency room use for asthma.17 Their study differed from ours in three
Acknowledgments
We are particularly indebted to Domenic Iezzoni, MD, and Elon Ronberg for their work on earlier analyses that made the current study possible. We also thank Randy Artiglere, Niketa Schueler, and Tony Yang, PhD, for their work on programming and Susan Garavaglia, PhD, and Charles M. Alcorn, ScD, for their insights and comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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