This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

We read with interest the article by Diette and associates¹ published in the May 27, 2002, issue of the ARCHIVES. The authors reported that 91% of elderly asthmatic patients had at least 1 comorbid condition such as sinusitis, heartburn, or chronic bronchitis. We propose that arrhythmia and coronary disease are much more important comorbid diseases because theophylline and -agonist use can affect cardiac function.^2-3 However, there was no information about these comorbid diseases in the article. How many patients had these comorbid diseases? In our elderly asthmatic patients, 7.5% and 5% of patients had arrhythmia and coronary disease, respectively. The authors showed that comorbid illness was one of the predictors of future hospitalization. We would appreciate knowing about the causes for hospitalization of the elderly because the asthmatic patients were admitted to the hospital because of uncontrolled asthmatic status not because of deterioration of a comorbid condition.

The authors reported . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLES

Elderly Asthmatic Patients
Gregory B. Diette and Albert W. Wu
Arch Intern Med. 2003;163(1):122.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Asthma in Older Patients: Factors Associated With Hospitalization
Gregory B. Diette, Jerry A. Krishnan, Francesca Dominici, Ed Haponik, Elizabeth Ann Skinner, Donald Steinwachs, and Albert W. Wu
Arch Intern Med. 2002;162(10):1123-1132.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT