[A comparative study of epinephrine injection and beta 2-agonist inhalation in the treatment of childhood asthma].

A total of 29 cases were enrolled in this study and divided randomly into Group I (traditional epinephrine injection) and Group II (terbutaline nebulizer inhalation). If patients did not respond well to the initial therapy. a crossover therapeutic regimen was assigned and their pulmonary function, peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) was measured every 10 minutes for half an hour. Both groups of patients revealed significant improvement post initial treatment P less than 0.0001). Within group difference was analysis by Wilcoxon signed rank test. All subgroups at 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and 30 minutes were compared in terms of their baseline pulmonary function, epinephrine group P value showed 0.0059, 0.0038, 0.0025; and terbutaline nebulizer inhalation group P value showed as 0.0007. 0.0003, 0.0003 respectively. An analysis of the group with an initial PEFR below 40% of the normal predicted or the more severely ill childhood acute asthmatic patients, the ten minutes post-treatment PEFR value of the epinephrine group showed P = 0.059; a significant P value of 0.0038 was noted for the terbutaline inhalation group, but both group P value was less than 0.05 at 20.30 minutes post-treatment, respectively. Between-group difference was analysed by Mann Whitney U test. Although all time interval mean data showed higher for the terbutaline inhalation group, statistically it showed P greater than 0.05. The above data suggest terbutaline inhalation therapy at the dosage noted will have early onset of action and better early clinical improvement than the traditional epinephrine injection regimen. There seemed to be no difference in degree of improvement between the two regimens. Observation of crossover treatment found a 50% re-response rate in both group of of patients who did not respond well to their initial regimen, and post crossover treatment PEFR all showed statistically significant improvement. However, still there was no significant difference between the two groups. This suggests that the terbutaline nebulizer inhalation method can not totally replace the more traditional method of acute asthma management, and emphasizes that a crossover therapeutic regimen should be kept in mind because the re-response rate is still encouraging. According to the variance analysis, the most important factor influencing the final outcome was the degree of severity of the initial asthmatic attack. The lower in initial PEFR value. The worse the clinical response. Other factors like age, sex, duration of asthma (year) and time interval between onset to arrival at the emergency room, showed as neither significant nor important.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)