Survey finds minority children less likely to take asthma meds
NEW YORK Black and Hispanic children with asthma use preventive inhalers much less than their white counterparts, but use emergency inhalers designed to stop asthma attacks more, according to a new study.
Writing in the journal Chest, Deirdre Crocker from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and colleagues surveyed 1,485 black, Hispanic and white children with asthma who responded to the 2003-2004 four-state sample of the National Asthma Survey.
Analyzing the data, the authors found that twice as many black children had emergency room visits related to asthma as white children, and “significantly” fewer black and Hispanic children reported using inhaled corticosteroids than white children, calling it a “dramatic underuse” of the drugs resulting in a greater prevalence of symptoms of poorly controlled asthma. Larger percentages of black and Hispanic children – 26% and 19%, respectively – used short-acting beta-agonists designed to treat asthma attacks, compared with 12% of white children.
Factors such as economics, children’s weight and indoor smoking did not appear to affect whether the children used the inhaled corticosteroids, but the writers suggested one reason might be that the black and Hispanic children were more likely to visit the emergency room, where doctors are more likely to prescribe the short-acting inhalers than the preventive ones.