Article Text
PDF
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Q In children and adults with asthma, do long acting β agonists (LABAs) increase severe asthma exacerbations requiring hospital admission, life threatening asthma attacks, and asthma related deaths?
Clinical impact ratings GP/FP/Primary care ★★★★★★☆ Internal medicine ★★★★★★☆ Allergy & immunology ★★★★★★☆ Emergency medicine ★★★★★☆☆ Respirology ★★★★★☆☆
METHODS
Data sources:
Medline, EMBASE/Excerpta Medica, CINAHL, and Cochrane databases (all from 1966 to December 2005); references of selected reviews; and the US Food and Drug Administration website.
Study selection and assessment:
randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in any language that compared LABAs (salmeterol, formoterol, or eformoterol) with placebo and had ⩾3 month follow up. Patients were allowed to use short acting β agonists if needed. 19 RCTs (n = 33 826; mean age 37–38 y, 51% men) met the selection criteria. Quality assessment of individual studies was based on randomisation procedure, allocation concealment, blinding, dropouts and …
Footnotes
-
For correspondence: Dr S R Salpeter, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, San Jose, CA, USA. Salpeter{at}stanford.edu
-
Source of funding: no external funding.
Request Permissions
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.