Asthma Healing

By ERIC NAGOURNEY

Could indoor pools be contributing to the increase in asthma among children?

By PHILIP M. BOFFEY, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

Leading experts and professional groups are challenging the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the nonprescription use of an inhaler drug for asthma.

LEAD: The nation's death rate from asthma has increased by more than 30 percent in seven years, and nearly 10 million Americans are now affected by the disease, Federal health officials say.

Experimental medicines that attack allergies at their source open a new strategy for preventing asthma and hay fever, which afflict a quarter of all Americans, researchers say.

By GINA KOLATA

Although doctors who treat asthma patients have long worried that the overuse of medication might be making their patients worse, a small new study suggests that the most common problem in controlling the disease may be that doctors are not aggressive enough in their treatments.

A pharmaceutical company has advised Federal regulatory officials of a new report that suggests that excessive use of the most widely prescribed asthma drugs, beta-2 agonists, may increase the risk of fatal asthma attacks.

In the wake of a new study that found that the overuse of asthma drugs might be hazardous, physicians are urging patients not to stop using them but to use them correctly.

By BARRY MEIER

Behind a new study questioning the safety of some asthma drugs used by millions of Americans lies a curious series of events, linking science and business, that stretch from New Zealand to Germany to North America.

A new asthma inhalant drug works better at preventing attacks and lasts longer than a widely used medication, researchers say.

The maker of a new, long-acting asthma drug has issued a warning after doctors reported that the death of some asthma sufferers might be attributable to their improper use of it.

Abbott Laboratories received approval from a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel to sell a new class of asthma drug.

Copley Pharmaceutical Inc. has agreed to settle a shareholder lawsuit stemming from its recall of an asthma drug that may have caused numerous deaths and injuries.

BOLTS of thunder and lightning struck. Wind gusts scattered grass pollen over a wide area. Many people immediately began wheezing and having difficulty breathing from asthmatic attacks. Emergency rooms were swamped with 10 times the usual number of asthmatics. For nearly half the victims, it was the first asthmatic attack in their lives. Thirty hours later, it had turned into the largest epidemic of asthma following a thunderstorm.

SOME women with asthma find that they seem more likely to have attacks around the time that their menstrual periods begin. But even though the possibility of such a link was first reported in a medical journal in 1931, it has never been proved or studied extensively.

THE inhalers that are an essential part of daily life for many of the 24 million Americans with asthma and other respiratory diseases are due for a major overhaul, raising concerns among some patients and doctors about whether the medications they depend on will continue to be available.

Few pregnant women escape the well-meaning chums who insist they can tell a baby's sex from various telltale signs -- like the height of the mother's belly or the foods she craves.

In a powerful demonstration of how intimately mind and body are linked, researchers have shown that writing about traumatic experiences measurably improves the health of some patients suffering from chronic asthma or rheumatoid arthritis.

The Food and Drug Administration approved a new inhaled drug today for treating influenza, overriding a panel of independent scientific advisers who recommended five months ago that the drug be kept off pharmacy shelves because it is only marginally effective and may be dangerous for asthma patients.

More than 500,000 emergency injection kits for treating severe allergic reactions and asthma attacks are being recalled in the United States and Canada.