The children were also given inhaled albuterol — a rescue medication — for asthma flares, according to background information on the study from the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.
Study volunteers reported once a year to one of eight research centers in the United States and Canada to have lung function measurements, such as spirometry, a test that records how much air a person can breathe out in one second.
These tests allowed researchers to find patterns in the participants’ lung function.
At the end of the study, 11 percent of the young adults suffered from COPD. Other than persistent asthma, risks for COPD included being male and having poor lung function at the start of the study, the researchers said.
By the time children with persistent asthma reached early adulthood, 75 percent showed an early decline in lung function or reduced lung growth. Treating asthma in childhood didn’t change these patterns, McGeachie said.
More than 6 million children in the United States have asthma, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Alan Mensch is chief of pulmonary medicine at Northwell Health’s Plainview Hospital in New York. He said that “asthma is a common condition of childhood where airways which transport air to the lung sacs can be triggered to spasm and narrow.”
With medication, or on occasion spontaneously, the airways resume their normal diameter, Mensch said. Adults can develop a similar condition called COPD. Unlike asthma, however, COPD airways never resume their normal diameter. This results in differing degrees of chronic shortness-of-breath, he explained.
“The results of this study help us to identify asthmatic children who will go on to develop COPD as adults,” Mensch said. “Future studies will be necessary to determine if there are any treatments that can be taken to prevent this progression.”
Dr. Mary Makaryus, a pediatrician at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y., said “the goal of treating kids with asthma is to keep them in school and out of the emergency room, and give them a better quality of life, which means playing as hard as the kids without asthma do.”
The next step, she said, is to see if controlling persistent asthma with stronger medications might improve lung function better than the drugs used in this study.