Corticosteroids for Asthma

Excerpt

To the Editors: We were interested to read in the recent report by Stein and Cole (1) that methylprednisolone was not found to be beneficial in the emergency treatment of acute asthma. The study's methods, however, have several aspects that lead us to question their conclusions. First, we compared the beta-agonist therapy used in this study to that used in a previous study that found methylprednisolone to be beneficial (2). Stein and Cole used inhaled beta-agonists every 30 minutes or every hour; the previous study used inhaled drug every 2 hours. Stein and Cole used subcutaneous beta-agonists very sparingly; the