The Effect of Oral Montelukast in Controlling Asthma Attacks in Children: A Randomized Double-blind Placebo Control Study.

Oral Montelukast is recommended as maintenance therapy for persistent asthma, but there is controversy regarding its effectiveness in controlling asthma attacks. The present study was conducted to investigate the clinical efficacy of oral Montelukast for asthma attacks in children. This study was conducted as a double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial on 80 children aged 1-14 years with asthma who were admitted to the emergency department of Bahrami Children's Hospital (Tehran, Iran) during one year. Patients were randomly divided into case and control groups. In addition to the standard asthma attack treatment, Montelukast was prescribed in the case group and placebo in the control group for one week. Patients were evaluated in terms of asthma attack severity score and oxygen saturation percentage (SpO2) in room air as primary outcomes 1, 4, 8, 24 and 48 hours after admission. In the first 48 hours, there was no significant difference in the score of asthma attack severity and SpO2 between the case and control groups. There was no significant difference between the groups in terms of length of hospitalization or number of admissions to the intensive care unit. None of the patients were re-hospitalized after discharge. The results of this study showed that the use of Montelukast along with the standard treatment of asthma attacks in children has no added benefit.

Two Iranian families with a novel mutation in GJB2 causing autosomal dominant nonsyndromic hearing loss.

Mutations in GJB2, encoding connexin 26 (Cx26), cause both autosomal dominant and autosomal recessive nonsyndromic hearing loss (ARNSHL) at the DFNA3 and DFNB1 loci, respectively. Most of the over 100 described GJB2 mutations cause ARNSHL. Only a minority has been associated with autosomal dominant hearing loss. In this study, we present two families with autosomal dominant nonsyndromic hearing loss caused by a novel mutation in GJB2 (p.Asp46Asn). Both families were ascertained from the same village in northern Iran consistent with a founder effect. This finding implicates the D46N missense mutation in Cx26 as a common cause of deafness in this part of Iran mandating mutation screening of GJB2 for D46N in all persons with hearing loss who originate from this geographic region.