If you rely on a steroid inhaler, make sure you know about this recent study, as one woman details a nightmare health scare caused by hers.
Medicines often come with expected side effects, but when it comes to steroid inhalers – most commonly used to treat asthma – it can be deadly.
Jenni Murray, a columnist for the Daily Mail, revealed her ordeal after going to the doctors.
The writer explained that over a month ago, she had a CT scan of her chest conducted, but despite knowing about her asthma – which she’d had since she was four – she didn’t know that the treatment for it had given her additional worries.
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She explained how she had broken the T8 vertebra three years ago, but had no idea that the T7 below it ‘had collapsed'.
It was only when the doctor asked her if she used steroid asthma inhalers that she started her journey to understanding more about her blue inhaler, which used to be called Ventolin.
Murray has used her inhaler since 1969 to keep the condition – which causes inflammation and narrowing of the airways, per Asthma and Lung – at bay.
Steroid inhalers use steroids to reduce and prevent inflammation - rather than offer relief during an attack - and open up the airways. They come in either a brown, blue or red puffer.
The brown is the preventer, which is now prescribed in a red tube called Fostair, while the blue helps to relieve symptoms in the moment.
But Murray was shocked to realise the treatments might have come at a cost: ‘They may have kept me safe from a lethal asthma attack all these years, but I didn’t know there was a potentially grave consequence to taking them.’
According to her doctor, they’re ‘bad for your bones' and can even make them brittle.
While it might seem confusing, the science behind it has already been researched.
Per the University of Nottingham, taking steroid inhalers or tablets to treat asthma is ‘linked to a heightened risk of brittle bones (osteoporosis) and increased vulnerability to broken bones (fragility fractures)’.
The findings, which are published in the journal Thorax, found a ‘clear association between both cumulative dose and number of courses of inhaled or steroid tablets and the risk of osteoporosis or fragility fractures.’
Two to three steroid tablet prescriptions in the 12 months before the study was conducted were linked with ‘larger odds of osteoporosis: those given 9 or more prescriptions and cumulative doses of 2500 mg or more had more than 4 times the risk of those who weren’t prescribed these drugs, after accounting for potentially influential factors’.
The researchers also found these patients were also more than twice as likely to sustain a fragility fracture due to the steroids.
On top of the findings, it revealed that those who had 11 or more prescriptions for inhaled steroids were 60 per cent more likely to have osteoporosis and 31 per cent more likely to have fragility fractures than those who took alternative drugs.
Then, those who took doses culminating in more than 120 mg in the preceding year were 20 per cent more likely to end up with a fragility fracture.
Britt Jones