Nagging via text messages to help teens remember meds

Drotar once used a monitor to detect whether cystic fibrosis patients performed a chest-thumping therapy to clear their lungs. One teen's monitor showed weird readings: He'd strapped it onto his dog.

Kabrina Moton, 16, of Cincinnati knows she'll start wheezing and need her inhaler when she plays basketball if she hasn't taken her daily asthma pill.

Still, "one time I went a whole month without taking it," she confesses. "It's just work and school and being in and out of the house all the time. ... When I would think about it, I wasn't around it or I was out and I wouldn't remember later on."

Enter text messages.

Dr. Maria Britto, an asthma specialist at Cincinnati Children's, noticed that even when she's talking to adolescent patients perched on the clinic exam table, they'll keep texting on their cell phones.

"You have to get in their face a little," she says with a laugh.

But it sparked the idea for a study to see if a daily medication reminder via text message would improve kids' asthma control -preventing full-blown attacks, improving school attendance and decreasing doctor and emergency-room visits. After all, Britto says kids as young as 12 carry the phones into her clinic, poor and middle class alike.

Pilot testing recently began, with a full study set for later this year. Participants say what time they want the reminder, and a clinic volunteer types out the messages -words spelled out, no mimicking of kids' text lingo.

Moton says she texts a lot, so it's easy to spot her reminder at 7 each evening -and so far, she hasn't missed a dose.

"It always says, 'Have a nice day,'" she says. "It makes me feel good about it."