People with mild to moderate asthma experience fewer severe asthma attacks if they take vitamin D supplements. This review found that the average number of asthma attacks was equivalent to about one every four years in those taking vitamin D, compared to nearly one every two years in those taking a placebo. Half as many ...

Regular daily steroid inhalers reduce the number of severe asthma exacerbations requiring soluble tablets or injections in wheezing preschool children by about a third. Intermittent high-dose steroid inhalers, given only when symptoms of a cold begin, were also effective for children with occasional asthma or wheezing triggered by a virus. This strategy may reduce the ...

Practices using questionnaires to identify individuals at risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) increased the number of new cases found. In particular, posting questionnaires may be more effective than waiting for people to attend the GP surgery. Many people with COPD may dismiss or ignore symptoms such as chronic cough. Taking a more proactive ...

It may be possible to use venous blood and pulse oximeters to initially assess the severity of a flare up of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Blood gas levels were similar in people when testing blood from either arteries (the recommended test) or veins. Oxygen saturation using pulse oximeters – which attach to the end ...

This systematic review found high-flow oxygen delivered by nose was as effective and safe as other non-invasive methods of breathing support for preterm babies. The numbers of treatment failures, deaths and rates of chronic lung disease were similar. Most studies were of high-flow oxygen for babies after tubes used for ventilation had been removed. For ...

Chest physiotherapy for acute bronchiolitis in children under two has no benefits and may be harmful, according to a systematic review published by the Cochrane Collaboration. The research looked at three different types of chest physiotherapy. It found that none of the techniques helped children with bronchiolitis recover more quickly or led to any improvement ...

More use could be made of the STOP-Bang questionnaire as a self-completed ‘first check’ for detecting obstructive sleep apnoea or in selected people before surgery. The downside is that a high rate of false positives, identified by this review, means that many people in the community without the condition might test positive and receive unnecessary ...

Treating a common sleep-related breathing condition almost halved the chance of recurrent atrial fibrillation (AF, see Definitions). However, most of the included studies were observational. This makes it difficult to rule out the possibility of bias in choosing which patients to treat and therefore reduces our confidence in the size of this effect. The breathing ...

Strategies, known as shared decision making, reduced antibiotic prescribing for people with acute respiratory infections by almost 40% in the short term (up to six weeks). This Cochrane systematic review compared the strategies that promote better discussions between doctor and patient about benefits and harms of treatment in primary care. Interventions were a mix of ...

This review found that physiotherapist-led training in breathing before heart or major abdominal surgery was associated with a reduced risk of lung collapse or pneumonia after surgery. There was no evidence that it reduced the numbers of people ventilated for 48 hours or more, or the chance of death after the operation. Post-operative lung complications ...