Mild asthma needs less medicine

People with mild asthma may not need daily medicine to prevent flare-ups, as doctors now recommend.

People with mild asthma may not need daily medicine to prevent flare-ups, as doctors now recommend.

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A study found that patients who take medicine only when asthma attacks occur fare about as well as those who swallow a pill or use inhaled steroids every day.

If a bigger, longer study confirmed the results and patients with mild asthma switched to attacks-only treatment, about $2 billion a year would be saved on medication in the United States, lead researcher Dr Homer A Boushey said.

His team found that over a year, patients who took daily medicine to limit airway inflammation had about the same number of severe asthma attacks and changes in lung function, and reported similar quality of life, as those who used asthma inhalers only when flare-ups occurred.

"We may now have another way to treat adults with mild persistent asthma - with intermittent treatment," said James Kiley, director of the Division of Lung Diseases at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which funded the study.

But Kiley and other experts warned that asthma patients should not stop taking their "controller" medicine without consulting a doctor.

"There are major risks of not taking your asthma medication, including death," cautioned Boushey, director of the Asthma Clinical Research Center at University of California-San Francisco.