Breathing easier

New research into children's asthma medication could lead to significant benefits for them- and the health system.

- RUTH NICHOL

For most of their lives, Upper Hutt brothers Alec and Ronan Gall have used the blue Vento-lin inhalers familiar to several generations of New Zealanders to relieve their asthma symptoms.

But over the past year, Alec, 14, and Ronan, 11, have been using a different inhaler, Symbicort, which both relieves and helps prevent the symptoms. Symbicort is now the recommended first-line treatment to relieve symptoms in adolescents and adults after clinical trials by the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand (MRINZ) found it reduced the incidence of severe asthma attacks by between a third and a half.

Under current asthma guidelines, Symbicort is not yet recommended for children with mild asthma who, as with adults, account for most asthma cases. Instead, their recommended treatment is Ventolin or a similar inhaler called Respigen. However, that may eventually change, thanks to the efforts of Alec, Ronan and another 378 young people aged 5 to 15 taking part in an MRINZ clinical trial comparing the effectiveness of Ventolin and Symbicort in children with mild asthma.

The Children’s Anti-inflammatory Reliever (CARE) study has already recruited more than 200 participants and has now started recruiting in Auckland. Each participant is randomly assigned to use either a Ventolin or a Symbicort inhaler for a year whenever they have asthma symptoms. During the study, researchers meet with the participants five times (three times in person and twice remotely) to check how they’re going.

“It’s quite easy and not at all onerous,” says the boys’ mother, Louise Gall. “In terms of the paperwork, it’s just really noting down if the kids have had doctors’ appointments and what they’ve had the appointments for.”

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