Acetaminophen Linked to Childhood Asthma

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Moreover, acetaminophen increased the risk of eczema by 18 percent and rhinoconjunctivitis by 32 percent. Among children given high doses of acetaminophen, the risk for eczema almost doubled, and the risk for rhinoconjunctivitis increased by almost threefold, Beasley's group found.

Dr. Norman H. Edelman, vice president for health sciences and professor of medicine at SUNY Stony Brook University in New York, and spokesman for the American Lung Association, said the study adds more evidence to acetaminophen's link to asthma.

"The study is consistent with quite a few others which show that use of acetaminophen associated with an increased in the risk for asthma," Edelman said.

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Dr. Geoffrey Chupp, an associate professor of medicine and director of the Yale Asthma Clinic at Yale University School of Medicine, thinks the association between acetaminophen and asthma may be a sign of something else.

"Children who are taking acetaminophen may be getting sick more often and getting more respiratory viruses, and they are getting asthma for other reasons," Chupp said. "It's not actually due to the acetaminophen, but acetaminophen happens to be in the picture, because they get sick all the time."

Another study in the same journal concluded that allergic or not, allergic rhinitis is a predictor of asthma in adulthood.

In the study, researchers collected data on 6,461 patients without asthma. After 8.8 years of follow-up, the researchers found that 3.1 percent of the patients with non-allergenic rhinitis developed asthma, as did 4 percent of the individuals with allergic rhinitis. This compared with only 1.1 percent of the patients without rhinitis who developed asthma.

"This large prospective study provides strong evidence for an increased risk of asthma in adults with allergic rhinitis, and to a lesser extent non-allergic rhinitis... Several clinical trials in asthmatic patients with allergic rhinitis were associated with a reduction in asthma symptoms. However, only interventional studies could be used to conclude that the treatment of allergic rhinitis is effective in reducing the incidence of asthma," the authors concluded.

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