Racial Gap Exists For Asthma Inhaler Use

THURSDAY, May 28, 2026 (HealthDay News) — People of color are less likely to have access to asthma inhalers, a new study says.

Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans with asthma all use daily controller inhalers less than white folks, despite guidelines recommending them as the best treatment, researchers recently reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Lack of access to specialists likely is at the root of this disparity, driven by socioeconomic factors, researchers said.

The results were surprising, given that many more people have health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and other policies, researchers said.

“We have more people engaged in medical care and still see these gaps in treatment,” researcher Dr. Utibe Essien said in a news release. He’s an assistant professor of medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

For the new study, researchers tracked survey data for about 10,500 U.S. adults representing more than 1.1 million Americans treated for asthma between 2014 and 2023.

The team tracked the use among asthma patients of:

• Inhaled corticosteroids (ICS), which reduce airway inflammation

• Long-acting beta agonists (LABA), which keep airways open in the long-term

• Long-acting muscarinic antagonists (LAMA), which also relaxes airway muscles to allow for unobstructed breathing

• Short-acting beta-agonists (SABA), which provide quick relief when patients have an asthma attack. Reliance on SABA inhalers suggests a patient’s asthma is not well controlled.

Overall, results showed that more white people used ICS, LABA and LAMA inhalers:

• Nearly 30% of Asians, 34% of Black people and 35% of Hispanics used ICS compared with 39% of white folks.

• About 21% of Asians, 27% of Black people and 25% of Hispanics used LABA versus 32% of white people.

• Roughly 3% of Asians and Hispanics, and almost 4% of Black folks used LAMA versus about 6% of whites.

These differences in use diminished after researchers adjusted for socioeconomic and healthcare access factors, suggesting that those are the key drivers of the disparities, researchers said.

“However, these factors — including income, education, insurance status and access to specialty care — are themselves affected by racial and ethnic disparities, underscoring the complexity of achieving pharmacoequity,” they wrote.

There were no statistically significant differences among the different racial groups in SABA use, the study found.

The researchers expressed particular surprise that the widest gap involved steroid inhalers, which are easier to obtain and generally cost less.

“Again, that underscores the complexity of treating asthma when policies change and guidelines change in terms of what is recommended versus not recommended, which doctors have access to those guidelines, and how patients change their treatment based on those new guidelines,” Essien concluded.

More information

University of California-Davis has more on asthma inhalers.

SOURCE: University of California-Los Angeles, news release, May 22, 2026