Contrarily, they may increase the risk of pneumonia (one of the biggest killers in the US) in these patients.

However, without doctor’s recommendation, patients with COPD must not avoid using these inhalers as these devices prove beneficial in a number of cases, said Dr. M. Bradley Drummond, the lead author of the review.

Dr. Drummond, who is a fellow at the pulmonary and critical care medicine division at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, says: “Aside from well-known benefits, there are some possible risks and the review is about balancing them.”

The study has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Nov.26 issue.

Frequent wheezing, coughing and breathlessness are some common symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and the disease is the fourth leading cause of death in the US following heart disease, cancer and stroke. Though some treatments can prove helpful to ease the symptoms, there isn’t any specific cure for it.

According to Dr Drummond, “Smoking is one of the leading causes of the disease as it’s almost 90% cases relate to smoking. Abnormal inflammation can occur in the lungs due to smoke that destroys the ends of the airways and the body hardly extracts the oxygen from the air near them.”

If patients want to boost their life spans, they need quitting smoking and inhaling fresh air.

The study has been published in the Nov.4 issue of Neurology and it says that Alzheimer’s patients with diabetes have two times higher chances to die sooner that the people with dementia condition but without diabetes. Similarly, those with Alzheimer’s and hypertension have two-and-a-half times more chances to die sooner than the Alzheimer’s patients with normal blood pressure.

Yaakov Stern, who authored the study, says in an American Acdeamy of Neurology news release: “Different studies say that the average life span of someone diagnosed with Alzheimer’s can be anywhere between three to nine years and for that person and their caregiver every minute is precious. There are controllable factors that can drastically affect how long that person can survive.”

In this study, more than 300 people were involved and it also found that after Alzheimer’s diagnosis Hispanics live longer than withes or blacks. The researchers found that Hispanic lived eight years after diagnosis, blacks five years and non-Hispanic whites about four years.

But the results were no longer significant after adjusting gender and other factors.

“These findings are not significant, but they are somewhat intriguing and further study is required to find whether race affects Alzheimer’s survival time.” Stern added