Speaker: Christopher J. Lettieri, MD, Respiratory Care Specialist, Pulmonary and Critical Care Service, Department of Medicine, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC.
Treatment with gamma-interferon 1b (IFN) (Actimmune®, InterMune) resulted in enhanced functional capacity and improved exercise tolerance in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) when compared with control patients with IPF who were given [...]

Speaker: Horst Olschewski, MD, Professor and Chair, Division of Pulmonary Medicine, Medical University Clinic, Medical University, Graz, Austria.
In a subset analysis of patients with New York Heart Association (NYHA) class IV pulmonary hypertension (PH), treatment with iloprost (Ventavis®, CoTherix, Inc.), a prostacyclin that offers a noninvasive inhaled dosing approach, resulted in a significant improvement in [...]

Speaker: Anthony D. P’Urzo, MD, MSc, Family Physician and Director, Primary Care Asthma Clinic, and Lecturer, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The combination of AstraZeneca’s budesonide (Pulmicort®) and formoterol (Oxis® [BUD/FORM]) (Symbicort®, Single Inhaler Therapy™, AstraZeneca, Canada), administered for both maintenance and relief in patients with asthma, reduced the [...]

Nebulized Levalbuterol in Elderly Patients with Asthma
Speaker: Ronald J. Ozminkowski, PhD, Senior Economist, Outcomes Research and Economics, Research and Policy Group, The Medstat Group, Thomson Corporation, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
In an exploratory analysis of data collected on the management of elderly Medicaid patients with clinical asthma treatment with nebulized levalbuterol (Xopenex®, Sepracor, Inc.) resulted in a [...]

This study confirms previous reports of rates of asthma during pregnancy in the range of 0.4% to 1.3% (Table 2). It also demonstrates that rates of asthma during pregnancy are racially disparate, with African Americans and Hispanics at greater risk than whites. Furthermore, women with Medicaid and Medicaid Healthstart are at greater risk for asthma [...]

Descriptive Characteristics of the Study Population
Only the racial/ethnic groups of non-Hispanic whites (n=337,130), non-Hispanic African Americans (n= 102,129), and Hispanics (n=80,898) were used for the analyses presented in this report. Those with other race/ethnicity (n=36,440,6.6% of the study population) were excluded from the analyses because of their heterogeneity. The characteristics of the study population are [...]

The methods used have been described in part elsewhere but are summarized here. The data for this historical cohort study were obtained from an administrative database that contains linked birth certificate, infant death certificate, and maternal and newborn hospital discharge claims data for the delivery hospitalization for all singleton, live births to New Jersey residents [...]