Acid Reflux Treatment Has No Impact On Asthma

Main Category: Respiratory / Asthma
Also Included In: Acid Reflux / GERD
Article Date: 06 Apr 2009 - 4:00 PDT

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Having to deal with asthma is bad enough, but to make matters worse, one out of every three asthmatics in this country also suffers from acid reflux.* For years doctors thought that treating acid reflux might be able to help with asthma. But a new study in the April 9th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine casts some doubts about that.

Matthew Leitz has lived with asthma most of his life and has become accustomed to always having medicine nearby - he doesn't go anywhere without his inhaler.

"I would say about once a month I have something serious enough to call it an asthma attack. Other than that, it's a lot of wheezing and coughing," says Matt.

But inhalers are only part of the prescription for some people with asthma. It's estimated that 7-million of them* - or one out of three - have another problem in common: acid reflux.

"There is a proportion of patients who, for whatever reason, have acid in their esophagus, but they just don't feel it; it doesn't hurt, they don't really understand that but we know that it exists," says John Mastronarde, MD with the Ohio State University Medical Center.

Doctors had no idea if asthma and acid reflux were related. They wanted to know if treating one condition could help both. To find out, researchers like Dr. Mastronarde gave asthmatics a medicine to control their acid reflux. But after three years, a new study shows those patients aren't any better off.

"They really had no improvement in their asthma symptoms and they were basically the same as the folks who just got a placebo or a sugar pill," says Dr. Mastronarde.

Dr. Mastronarde says the findings are important because it will keep doctors from over-medicating those with asthma and acid reflux. As for patients, it could help lift the burden of paying for treatments that simply don't work.

For this study, doctors followed more than 400 people with asthma for three years. The findings are published in the April 9th edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

*What is Asthma?, Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America

Source
Ohio State University Medical Center