Children hospitalized with asthma who receive ibuprofen have shorter stays
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Children hospitalized for asthma exacerbations and treated with ibuprofen spend less time in the hospital than those treated with acetaminophen, data presented at the virtual Pediatric Academic Societies Annual Meeting showed.
Nisha Shah, a medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx, and colleagues conducted a retrospective chart review among children aged 2 to 18 years who were admitted to the hospital for asthma exacerbations between 2017 and 2019.
“We excluded patients with complex medical comorbidities, and those who do not receive standard of care for asthma,” Shah said in her presentation.
Shah said 1,769 patients met the criteria for inclusion in the study. Overall, the researchers found that patients who received ibuprofen had a shorter mean length of stay (1.98 days) compared with those treated with acetaminophen (2.48 days).
Additionally, in a subset analysis by weight class, patients with class 3 obesity had a longer length of stay than all others (2.92 days). Among 788 patients identified as obese or overweight, those receiving ibuprofen had a shorter length of stay (2.08 days) than those who received acetaminophen (2.69 days).
“Obesity-related asthma is thought to have a different pathophysiology than asthma in normal weight children. Specifically, there's an increased adipose-mediated inflammation in the obese phenotype,” Shah explained.
According to Shah, the resulting data showed “that there may be some role for the anti-inflammatory mechanisms of ibuprofen in treating asthma, especially in patients who are overweight or obese who have worse clinical outcomes.”
Elissa B. Gross, DO, MPH, an attending physician in the division of hospital medicine at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and coauthor of the study, said the findings offer additional benefits.
“This could save health care costs and reduce missed school days for children,” Gross told Healio. “Further investigation is needed to see if ibuprofen can help children who are obese with asthma.”