U.K. doctors ignore asthma guidelines

LONDON, Sept. 4 (UPI) -- About 250,000 children in Britain are getting the wrong asthma treatment because doctors are ignoring prescribing guidelines, Australian researchers found.

Some 1 million children in the United Kingdom have asthma and the disease prompts up to one-third of children ages 5 to 13 to visit their doctor.

Researchers at Sydney Children's Hospital used British data to calculate the number of prescriptions issued for asthma drugs from 2000 to 2006 and the figures were matched with guidance issued by the British Thoracic Society for the most appropriate drug treatments for children with asthma.

The study, published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, found that despite guidelines discouraging the use of bronchodilator syrups designed to open up the airways but which don’t actually control asthma symptoms very well, 121,000 prescriptions for the medicine were still written in 2006.

In addition, despite recommendations to curb the use of beta agonists, known as LABAs, in children, the total number of these prescriptions almost doubled, while the percentage of prescriptions for combination inhalers, containing steroid and a LABA, rose from 2.6 percent to 20.5 percent.