Home-made spacers as effective as commercial spacers for bronchodilator therapy in children with acute asthma

Recently, I saw a blog post titled "Treating Asthma on the Cheap" which described a spacer device made out of a 500-ml water bottle. It sounds unlikely but this may work after all.

A Cochrane review found no difference between commercial and home-made spacers in delivering bronchodilator http://goo.gl/c7lVf

Home-made spacers for bronchodilator therapy in children with acute asthma were as effective as commercial spacers in a RCT published in the Lancet. A conventional spacer and sealed 500 mL plastic bottle produced similar bronchodilation in children with acute asthma http://bit.ly/VOXkj

However, a recent letter claims that spacers should not be regarded as interchangeable: each pMDI–spacer combination should be treated as a unique system (ERJ, 2012).

References:

Commercial versus home-made spacers in delivering bronchodilator therapy for acute therapy in children | Cochrane Summaries, 2011.

Image source: Plastic bottles before processing. Wikipedia, dierk schaefer, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

Comments from Twitter:

Natasha Burgert @DoctorNatasha: Really? Hmmmm. RT @DrVes: Home-made spacers as effective as commercial spacers for bronchodilator therapy in children goo.gl/bKt17