Allergies & Asthma

SAN FRANCISCO — Phase III results look very good for a two-drug combination inhaler in helping asthma patients regain symptom control when maintenance medications weren’t doing the job. In the MANDALA trial, patients using the investigational product PT027, which combines 90 μg of albuterol with 80 μg of budesonide, were significantly less likely to experience

TTHealthWatch is a weekly podcast from Texas Tech. In it, Elizabeth Tracey, director of electronic media for Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, and Rick Lange, MD, president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, look at the top medical stories of the week. This week’s topics include use of ECMO in

As if sneezing and itching wasn’t enough, some people experience heartburn symptoms due to their environmental and/or food allergies. Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) might be to blame. It can be allergy-related, but mainly causes reactions that impact your digestive system. The first official EoE diagnosis was in the 1990s, but there’s been an increase in diagnoses and ongoing research

From a patient’s perspective, it’s simple to see why treating the cause of allergies is beneficial. But how does an employer benefit? Why would an employer want to offer disease-modifying allergy treatment, and what does their return on investment look like? Though this often looks different from employer to employer, three main reasons seem to

TTHealthWatch is a weekly podcast from Texas Tech. In it, Elizabeth Tracey, director of electronic media for Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, and Rick Lange, MD, president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, look at the top medical stories of the week. This week’s topics include healthy lifestyle and Alzheimer’s,

Starting children on allergy immunotherapy while they’re young has a lot of benefits – they feel better, they miss less school, and it can halt the allergic march. But the idea of weekly injections can be scary and unrealistic for school-aged children. That’s where sublingual immunotherapy, or allergy drops, come in. This safe, simple, at-home

You may have noticed your child’s eczema, or atopic dermatitis, symptoms before — their skin is dry, itchy, red, and swollen. Scratching only seems to make symptoms worse and your kiddo more miserable. You’ve tried topical creams, ointments, and lotions, but for some reason the symptoms keep coming and going, leaving you stumped. It probably

Mothers who were exposed to disinfectants on the job were more likely to have children with asthma, an analysis of a large birth cohort from Japan suggested. After adjusting for many factors including maternal return to work 1 year after giving birth, mothers who used disinfectants every day in the prenatal period were more likely

The intranasal live attenuated flu vaccine is just as safe for children with asthma as the intramuscular inactivated vaccine, a small clinical trial suggested. Within 42 days of vaccination, 10.8% of children who received the intranasal quadrivalent live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV4) experienced an asthma exacerbation compared with 14.7% of those who received the intramuscular

Doctors, scientists, and patient advocates described the tremendous harms of burn pits to active duty service members and veterans, ranging from cancers to severe respiratory illness and death, during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel on Wednesday. Subcommittee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) opened the hearing by stating that service

Patients with hereditary angioedema who were treated with an antisense oligonucleotide treatment, donidalorsen, experienced significantly fewer attacks than patients who received placebo, a phase II trial showed. Over 17 weeks, the mean number of investigator-confirmed angioedema attacks was 0.23 per month among the 14 patients treated with donidalorsen 80 mg every 4 weeks compared with

The first generic version of Symbicort — a metered-dose inhaler that combines the corticosteroid budesonide with the long-acting bronchodilator formoterol — has been approved for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the FDA announced on Tuesday. In asthma, the combination is indicated for adults and kids ages 6 and older to prevent symptoms (not

If you’re ready for a cold and snowy winter season to end (we may be biased here in the Midwest!), there’s nothing quite like the thought of spring, budding trees, blooming flowers, the first robin sighting, and hope for warmer days ahead. But, with budding trees comes the start of “hay fever” season. Tree pollen

PHOENIX — Exacerbation-prone asthma patients who had high blood eosinophil counts or elevated fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) appeared to benefit from lebrikizumab, pooled data from two disappointing phase III trials suggested. In the post-hoc analysis of LAVOLTA I and LAVOLTA II, patients with at least one exacerbation in the prior year who had high

PHOENIX – Patients who have nasal polyps appeared to get symptom relief when treated with omalizumab (Xolair) regardless of comorbid asthma, according to a post-hoc trial analysis. All patients taking omalizumab achieved deep drops in symptoms on various tests and improvements remained even after the study drug was discontinued during a follow-up period compared with

PHOENIX — Patients with severe, uncontrolled asthma experienced greater relief throughout the year when treated with the biologic tezepelumab (Tezspire) versus placebo, according to findings from the phase III NAVIGATOR study. Over 52 weeks, tezepelumab significantly reduced the annualized asthma exacerbation rate by 56% in the overall study population (P<0.001), and by 41% in those

PHOENIX — Adding mepolizumab (Nucala) to guideline-based care reduced flare-ups in disadvantaged kids with exacerbation-prone, eosinophilic asthma, the yearlong MUPPITS-2 trial showed. In the randomized study of nearly 300 kids living in urban parts of the U.S., the annualized exacerbation rate was 0.96 with mepolizumab versus 1.30 with placebo, representing a 27% relative decrease (rate

Children who received mechanical ventilation at a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) had slightly worse cognitive outcomes in the long run compared with their siblings, a prospective cohort study found. At 3 to 8 years after discharge from a PICU, kids who had received mechanical ventilation for acute respiratory failure had a mean estimated IQ

PHOENIX — Experts in lung diseases debated at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology here whether at-home spirometry tests and devices, which are now available from multiple companies, should be elevated to prime-time use. The tests are good enough to allow patients to monitor their lung function at home

A drug-eluting contact lens containing an antihistamine for people with allergic eye itch won approval from the FDA, Johnson & Johnson Vision Care announced. The daily disposable etafilcon A drug-eluting contact lens with ketotifen (Acuvue Theravision with ketotifen) is the world’s first drug-eluting contact lens, the company said. It recently was approved in Japan and

PHOENIX — Treatment with the interleukin-5 (IL-5) antagonist mepolizumab (Nucala) reduced the need to take oral corticosteroids by 75% in patients who had depended on the steroids to control symptoms of severe asthma, a researcher reported here. Patients on a median 10 mg maintenance dose of oral corticosteroids at baseline reduced their intake to 2.5

Seasons change… Trees and flowers start budding to form colorful landscapes. Green-leafed trees change into a rainbow of fall colors. Those fall colors turn into a winter wonderland. Sounds pretty, right? What isn’t pretty — the misery that seasonal allergies often bring. Even though allergies cause problems year round, a number of environmental allergens “peak”

PHOENIX — In some patients with eosinophilic asthma, dupilumab (Dupixent) offered the highest chance of better lung function, although the agent also carried the highest odds of serious adverse events (AEs), a researcher reported. In an indirect treatment comparison of dupilumab, mepolizumab (Nucala), and benralizumab (Fasenra), patients with eosinophil counts ≥300 cells/μL treated with dupilumab

PHOENIX — Biologic medications sent severe asthma into remission in a substantial proportion of patients, according to a study presented here at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. About 35% of 908 patients who took biologic treatments for at least 12 months were able to achieve remission status, reported

PHOENIX — Nearly three-fifths of patients with eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) achieved remission after treatment with dupilumab (Dupixent), researchers reported. In a 6-month study, 58.8% of adults and adolescents treated with dupilumab achieved histological remission compared to 6.3% in the placebo group (P<0.0001), according to Marc Rothenberg, MD, PhD, of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, in a pre-recorded

Black and Latinx patients who used an inhaled glucocorticoid as needed along with usual care had improved asthma outcomes, according to results from the PREPARE trial. In the study of patients with moderate-to-severe asthma, and compared to a control group that continued usual care only, the intervention group experienced a 15% decrease in risk of

Obesity may put women at a higher risk for airway obstructive diseases, a Korean population-based cohort study suggested. In an adjusted model, premenopausal women with severe obesity had a 67% higher risk for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD; HR 1.67, 95% CI 1.54-1.81), while postmenopausal women had a 57% elevated risk (HR 1.57, 95% CI

[embedded content] When considering which specialty to pursue, many premeds place a heavy emphasis on annual salary. What they often fail to consider, though, is the time that is required to make the big bucks. We took the average annual salary for each specialty and divided it by the number of hours worked per week