Personal Health: News and Notes

Even though talk therapy is not a familiar concept to recent Asian immigrants to this country, telephone counseling is an effective way to help them quit smoking, a new study shows.

University of California-San Diego researchers developed a telephone "quit line" script that was culturally tailored to Asian attitudes and translated into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. The new quit lines were then advertised in Asian media outlets throughout California.

About 2,300 callers were recruited and assigned to receive a self-help quit-smoking manual, with or without telephone counseling consisting of a 40-minute pre-quit session plus five relapse-prevention calls.

Adding counseling more than doubled the six-month abstinence rate, from 8 percent for those who got just the manual to 16.4 percent for the quit-line callers. All three language groups benefited.

The study, published online this month in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, concluded that the counseling "should be incorporated into existing quit lines" - and maybe extended to other Asian languages.

- Marie McCullough

Asthma and acid-reflux disease are both common disorders in children, and doctors have theorized that untreated acid reflux makes asthma worse.

But now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that adding the acid-reflux drug Prevacid to standard asthma medications does not improve asthma symptoms or lung function - not even in children who have been diagnosed with acid reflux.

Worse, the study found that children with poorly controlled asthma who took Prevacid had more upper respiratory tract infections, sore throats, and bronchitis than those who took a placebo pill.

The study appeared in last week's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In an accompanying editorial, University of Arizona respiratory specialist Fernando Martinez called the "overuse" of Prevacid in children with asthma - and pediatrics in general - an example of "therapeutic creep" that may have "substantially contributed to the marked increase in asthma drug costs."

- Sandy Bauers

State laws that restrict teens from driving with multiple passengers are a good idea, but firm involvement by parents also helps, according to a pair of new studies led by researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

In a study of 198 drivers, three factors were found to be associated with safer driving behaviors: a teen's awareness of what constitutes risky driving behavior; a teen's perception that his or her parents are "strong monitors" and rule-setters; and a lower tendency to engage in "thrill-seeking."

The second study, of 677 drivers, explored just how the presence of passengers can cause problems. Teenage males driving with peers in the car were more likely than solo drivers to have driven aggressively or to have performed an illegal maneuver just before a crash. Female teen drivers with peer passengers, on the other hand, were more likely to have experienced a distraction inside the car before a crash.

Both studies were published last week in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

- Tom Avril

Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and most other states require that children use car booster seats until they are big enough for seat belts alone.

But a University of Michigan study has found that carpooling is a big obstacle to booster-seat use, even among parents who recognize that the devices reduce injuries in a crash.

The researchers conducted a national survey of 1,612 parents of children ages 4 to 8. Although 76 percent reported that their child used a booster seat when riding in the family car, 30 percent did not enforce the rule when their child rode in another driver's car.

What's more, 45 percent of parents said that when driving other children who did not have a booster, they let their own child go without one.

Studies show children need a booster to improve seat-belt fit until they are about 4 feet, 9 inches tall and weigh 80 pounds - around age 8.

Since carpooling is common among parents of young children, doctors should stress the importance of safety seats "for every child on every trip," the researchers wrote in the February issue of the journal Pediatrics.

- M.M.