Allergies & Asthma

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 computer-based therapy for PTSD,

Since 2000, Allergychoices has supported providers from every corner of the country with offering sublingual immunotherapy — a disease modifying allergy treatment. Each provider has their own story about offering this treatment, with personal anecdotes of how it has ultimately impacted both practice and patients. Amber Beckenhauer, DO, added allergy testing and sublingual immunotherapy to

There is a familiar, tropical, smell that comes to mind when you think back on beach days or soccer games in the middle of the summer — the sweet smell of sunscreen. Are you using allergy-safe sunscreen? For those with allergies and eczema, sunscreen is just another product that should be thoroughly examined and tested

The difference between a food intolerance and food allergies can be confusing. Find out what causes symptoms, what symptoms look like, diagnosis processes, and how allergy drop immunotherapy can treat the cause of food allergy. What is a food intolerance? A food intolerance can occur from a variety of causes including a missing enzyme needed to digest food,

Presentation A 72-year-old man presented to the doctor with complaints of hip pain and groin pain affecting his left lower extremities that gradually began over the last couple of months. The patient denied recent trauma. He had COPD and had received high-dose injections of triamcinolone as intermittent treatment over the course of his adult life.

SAN FRANCISCO — Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) who changed treatment from so-called triple therapy to a two-drug product omitting the inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) component tended to see improved symptom control, as well as fewer adverse effects, a researcher said here. In a German registry study, it took about 14 months for half

SAN FRANCISCO — A plant-centric diet in early adulthood was associated with less risk of emphysema in middle age, results of a long-running cohort study indicated. Participants whose diets at enrollment were in the top quintile on the A Priori Diet Quality Score (APDQS) system had 60% lower odds of developing emphysema over 30 years

The COVID-19 pandemic was a double-edged sword for patient engagement. For some, the inability to access traditional, brick-and-mortar healthcare opened their minds to virtual solutions and helped them get more acutely involved with their health. For others, the past 2 years magnified feelings of isolation and helplessness, which perpetuated a sense of overwhelm about their

SAN FRANCISCO — Ordinary adolescents showed higher levels of a biomarker for airway inflammation in the days following rain or snow, researchers reported here. For every 2 mm/day of precipitation averaged over the previous week, Massachusetts teens showed a 3.64% increase (95% CI 0.72-6.65) in fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO), according to a group led

SAN FRANCISCO — For neighborhoods near a major coking operation in Pittsburgh, its shutdown at the end of 2015 was followed by markedly lower rates of respiratory disease hospitalizations, researchers reported here. Inpatient admissions for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) among area residents were steadily increasing during 2013 to 2015. But from 2016 onward, they

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