This finding was released at the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology annual meeting in the winter of 2009. Researchers who looked at claims data of patients who suffer from both asthma and elevated cholesterol problems found that those who took a popular class of cholesterol medicine called statin therapy along with inhaled corticosteroids asthma treatment had fewer asthma symptoms overall and their emergency room visits actually went down, compared to their asthmatic counterparts who weren't being treated for cholesterol issues.

An Effective Form of Asthma Treatment

In fact, the study results found that the odds of an emergency room visit or hospitalization among asthmatics using corticosteroids who also took cholesterol medicine decreased by 33 percent, perhaps due to the anti-inflammatory effects that the statins have on their users. Since asthma occurs at least in part because of an inflammation of the airways, this makes sense to many medical professionals that this would be an effective asthma treatment.

Conflicting Findings

Complicating matters, though, is that another well-respected new study using claims data from Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, Calif., revealed that statin drugs and asthma patients on corticosteroids were a bad combination, causing breathing symptoms to worsen, not get better.

Possible Explanations

Despite the contradicting results of the two studies, some experts say that both findings could be accurate. There is some speculation that a possible reason that this discrepancy exists when it comes to cholesterol medicine and asthma treatment is because more factors were considered in the second study, which enabled researchers to get a clearer snapshot of the reaction that statins can cause in people with asthma...

Click here to read more from Quality Health