Athletes needing asthma drugs face extra hurdles

With better treatments, more asthmatics are becoming athletes, but they struggle with a sports mind-set and some International Olympic Committee rules not conducive to treatment compliance.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Sept. 24, 2001.

Jim Davis, the creator of the cartoon cat Garfield, credits his success to a childhood spent indoors drawing. He wasn't allowed to play outside because of his asthma.

This condition may have also been a factor that led other famous people -- Ludwig Van Beethoven, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, for instance -- to nurture their talent, because their lung function did not allow them to do more active things.

But the days in which asthmatics were relegated to quiet, indoor lifestyles are long past. Improved pharmaceutical options mean that asthma no longer automatically precludes a person from participating in sports.

Most asthmatics are now able to compete, and some do so at the highest level. Track and field athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, swimmer Amy Van Dyken and Washington Redskins fullback Donnell Bennett are all asthmatics and top-flight athletes. The list keeps growing. And even at the recreational level, people who use inhalers before and during competition are a regular sight.

"Even kids with severe asthma can be well-controlled and well-conditioned to participate in all age-appropriate physical activity," said Martin Hurwitz, MD, clinical associate professor in the pediatric pulmonology department at the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor. "And they can play competitive sports, sometimes at extremely high levels where the limitations are only their own innate physical gifts."

Physicians complain, however, that the combination of a sports mindset that makes people think they are invincible, and an international sporting world obsessed with getting drugs out of sports -- even those needed to treat a medical condition -- is hampering treatment efforts. [...]