For people with mild asthma, exercises that focus on shallow breathing through the nose, as well as non-specific upper body exercises, can reduce the need to use a bronchodilator inhaler, according to a new report.
Many people with asthma rely on puffs of a short-acting beta-2 agonist, such as albuterol, to relieve breathing difficulties. Also, "breathing techniques are among the most popular complementary medicine modalities used by people with asthma," the authors of the study note in the medical journal Thorax.
They found that, while the shallow breathing and upper body exercise approach were completely different, they provided similar improvements in asthma outcomes.
This suggests that the benefits "were not due to the use of a particular type of exercise, but to the process of both routine and as-required exercises that reinforce a message of relaxation and self-efficacy and provide a deferral strategy for beta-2 agonist use," write Dr C. A. Slader, from the University of Sydney, Australia, and colleagues.
The team assessed the outcomes of 57 patients with mild asthma who were randomly assigned to perform one of the two breathing techniques twice daily for 30 weeks. After 16 weeks, an attempt was made to decrease the amount of inhaled corticosteroids the patients were taking for the long-term control of their asthma.
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