RESUMO
The leukotriene antagonists have represented the first novelty in the treatment of asthma over the last 20 years. Their easy oral administration that favours a suitable completion of the treatment, especially on children, together with the proven efficiency and their apparent safety, gave rise to the fact in 1999 the asthma committee of the Spanish Society of Clinical Immunology and Paediatric Allergology (SSCIPA) in the bronchial asthma treatment guide that was presented a year ago during the XXIII National Congress of our Society, considered the antileukotrienes, together with the chromones, as important medicines for stage 2 asthma (frequent episodes) and as useful medicines to reduce the need to take corticoides in cases of persistent asthma. A year later, in our study we proposed to value too suitability or non suitability of this positioning, in the light of the new investigations published and from our own experience. We believe that the bibliography available to date shows that the agonist cysteinyl-leukotrienes are anti-inflammatory medicines, that have an efficiency similar to that of low doses of inhaled corticoids, equally efficient in controlling bronchospasm-induced exercise and they have a good safety profile. We present two studies that are the result of our own experience, one carried out on children with persistent asthma and the other on children with frequent episodic asthma, from which we can apparently deduce that both nedocromil (2 inhalations every 8 hours) and montelukast (5 mg every 24 hours) are medicines that have similar efficacy in the control of asthma. We conclude that the antileukotrienes, together with the chromones, should be seen as important medicines when treating infant asthma.
