"Patients with asthma that is not adequately controlled with the usual asthma medications, and who have no symptoms of heartburn, but who may or may not have silent GERD, don't seem to have any improvement of asthma when treated with esomeprazole (Nexium)," said one of the study's Jared Wise, a professor of medicine in the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Doctors have suspected that if people with asthma breathe in during reflux, they might breathe irritating stomach fluids into the lungs. But some people have what's known as silent GERD, meaning they have no symptoms. To reduce that possibility, doctors have been prescribing acid-suppressing medications known as proton pump inhibitors (PPI).

Many people with asthma also have gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD. Although the two conditions may seem quite different, doctors have long suspected that they're linked, with each disorder possibly.

-- Acid-suppressing medications won't ease asthma symptoms if you don't have heartburn symptoms, too, a new study has found.

But a study in the issue of the New England Journal of Medicine repots that a PPI probably isn't going to help lessen wheezing in people with silent GERD.