Long-Acting β<sub>2</sub>-Agonist Step-off in Patients With Controlled Asthma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Because of concerns about the safety of long-acting β(2)-agonist (LABA) use in patients with asthma, withdrawal of the LABA is recommended by the US Food and Drug Administration once asthma is controlled by combination therapy with a LABA and inhaled corticosteroid (ICS). OBJECTIVE: To perform a systematic review and meta-analysis assessing evidence supporting the discontinuation of LABA therapy once asthma control has been achieved with a combination of ICS and LABA. DATA SOURCES: MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials databases were searched (through August 2010), references of identified studies and selected narrative review articles were evaluated, registries of clinical trials were reviewed, and manufacturers of LABAs were contacted. STUDY SELECTION: Randomized controlled trials of discontinuation of LABA therapy in patients with asthma controlled with a combination of ICS and LABA. DATA EXTRACTION: Two reviewers independently screened each title and abstract in the initial searches and then the full text of each nominated article to extract data for analyses. RESULTS: Of 1492 screened articles, only 5 trials involving patients aged 15 years or older fulfilled a priori–specified inclusion criteria. Results did not favor the LABA step-off approach compared with no change in treatment. The LABA step-off regimen increased asthma impairment, with worse Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire score (mean difference [95% CI], 0.32 [0.14-0.51] points lower); worse Asthma Control Questionnaire score (0.24 [0.13-0.35] points higher); fewer symptom-free days (9.15% [1.62%-16.69%] less); and greater risk of withdrawal from study resulting from lack of efficacy or loss of asthma control (risk ratio, 3.27 [2.16-4.96]). Risk of exacerbations and deaths after LABA step-off were not evaluable because of the small number of events and short duration of follow-up. CONCLUSIONS: Evidence suggests that discontinuing LABA therapy in adults and older children with asthma controlled with a combination of ICSs and LABAs results in increased asthma-associated impairment. Additional trials measuring all long-term patient-important outcomes are needed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".