In the past few years, the treatment of asthma has been improved enormously with the introduction of new drugs, which can be taken as pills, liquid medicine or inhalants. Corticosteroid prophylactics are inhaled 2 or 4 times a day. These are not the anabolic steroids misused by athletes. The doctor will decide which type to prescribe on the strength of your description of how and when breathlessness occurs. Many bronchodilators are packaged in small aerosols with a mouthpiece, enabling you to inhale a measured dose of the drug as and when necessary.
Nebulisers are especially useful for treating infants.
Sometimes, if no pill, liquid or inhalant succeeds in relieving a severe case of asthma, the drug is injected into the bloodstream, and this method almost always works. If your asthmatic attacks are clearly caused by some allergen such as grass pollen, it is possible to desensitise the lungs against that allergen by means of a long course of injections. If you suspect that the cause may be something you eat or drink, you should consult your doctor for advice on skin testing for allergy and possibly also about exclusion diets. However, the drugs already discussed are proving so effective that doctors seldom recommend desensitisation as a treatment for asthma, chiefly because its success rate is low and unpredictable. Severe reactions to densensitisation, although rare, can be fatal.