“HealthDay News” reported on Feb. 13th that the current issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology published a series of studies focusing on health disparities among people with asthma.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) children from low-income families and children of color are more likely to have asthma. Non-Hispanic black children living in families with incomes below the poverty level have the highest rates of asthma of any group: 8.3 percent of children.
African Americans have higher asthma death rates according to 4woman.gov. Asthma is slightly more common in African Americans than any other race.
According to one website for asthmatics, many adult asthmatics believe in a dangerous myth – that when they don’t have symptoms they don’t have asthma.
On March 3rd GlaxoSmithKline announced an agreement with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with new patient and doctor advice for Serevent® and Advair® inhalers.
Growth impairment and suppression of the adrenal glands are concerning side effects of treating asthmatic children with inhaled corticosteroids.
I was put on steroids in 1992 and have been off and on them for years, but am not on them now. However, I was only told I might gain a little weight and it wasn’t until 1998 that I found out the drugs destroy your adrenal gland. They also cause urinary tract infections, loss of muscle control, deteriorate your bones, sweats, excessive hunger, significant weight gain, insomnia, aggression, and other symptoms I didn’t discover for a long time.
I went from being skinny to gaining 60 pounds.
According to writer Alan Mozes the common asthma medication salmeterol (Serevent) poses a risk to black patients. A study found the likelihood of asthma-related deaths was slightly higher with the drug.
“The latest finding echoes an earlier study which was also stopped before completion,” said Mozes. “The latest study confirms the risks identified three years ago.”
Researchers noted that blacks reported less corticosteroid use and higher hospitalization and emergency room visit rates due to asthma before the study started.
In studies of three specific industrial areas, researchers found that a higher percentage of African Americans than Whites lived closer to industrial sources of air pollution, including toxic emissions, and were more likely to live near multiple sources of such emissions, according to the American Lung Association.
African Americans are more likely than whites to work in the asbestos, textile, coal, and silica mining industries where they are overexposed to occupational respiratory hazards that cause chronic occupational lung diseases such as silicosis and asbestosis.
