Storing it in the bathroom and making it part of a daily routine may be helpful advice that doctors can give their older asthmatic patients who struggle to remember to take their daily prescribed medication.

This advice comes from Alex Federman, Associate Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, senior author of a study which discusses how elderly asthmatics cope with taking their inhaled corticosteroid medication as prescribed. The findings appear in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, published by Springer.

The regular use of such medication helps to control the chronic lung inflammation characteristic of asthma, a disease that affects up to 9% of Americans older than 65 years. However, the fact that elderly patients often struggle to stick to their prescriptions is worrying, as approximately two in every three asthma-related deaths in the US occur among people older than 55 years old.