Posts Tagged ‘leukotriene antagonists’

Question: Are leukotriene receptor antagonists such as Singulair effective in treating asthma in children?

Search strategy from PubMed:

“Leukotriene Antagonists “[Pharmacological Action] AND “Asthma”[Majr] Limits: English, Systematic Reviews, Child: 6-12 years”

We used the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) database to identify the pharmacological action of Singulair to find studies that also looked at other drugs that fell into this category.  Using the “Child: 6 – 12 years” limit is a way to get around including studies with adults (the “All Child” limit include age 18 so it using can often retrieves studies that include adults).

Selected articles:

Clinical inquiries. How effective are leukotriene inhibitors for asthma in children?

Inhaled glucocorticoids versus leukotriene receptor antagonists as single agent asthma treatment: systematic review of current evidence.

For comparisons sake, we also repeated the search in the Evidence Based Medicine Reviews (EBMR) database  (this datase searches the ACP Journal Club, Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effectiveness).

The EMBR database only allows you to search with keywords – no MeSH terms.  In order to have some control over the search, we used the “Search Fields” options.  This allows you to limit where in the citation the keyword must be found.  Another hint:  this database isn’t good with age limits, to limit your search to pediatric topics consider searching for “child$” in the title field.

Search strategy from EBMR:

1     (leukotriene antagonist or leukotriene receptor antagonist).ab,ti.

2     asthma.ab,ti.

3     child$.ti.

4     1 and 3 and 2

Selected articles:

Response profiles to fluticasone and montelukast in mild-to-moderate persistant childhood asthma

Montelukast for chronic asthma in 6- to 14-year-old children: a randomized, double-blind trial. Pediatric Montelukast Study Group