Breathe Deep, Reconsider Your Singulair Rx

Potential Mental Health Side Effects of Common Asthma and Allergy Medication

Recent information, underscoring the potential mental health risks of the common asthma medication, Singulair is essential information to share. About 8% of Americans are diagnosed with asthma which translates to about 20 million adults and 6 million children. Like many chronic ailments, people of color and those with lower income, as well as seniors bear the most burden with higher incidence, more ER visits, and more fatal asthma attacks.

There are many approaches to asthma from both a conventional and more natural, integrative perspective. That said, in 2022, over 12 million Americans took Singular or its generic, Montelukast, for allergies and/or asthma including 1.2 million children. And though the Food and Drug Administration issued a clear black box warning about this medication in 2020, the number of prescriptions for this drug has remained steady. Many patients continue to take the medicine and are uninformed about its potential to lead to serious mental health and neuropsychological issues including anxiety, hallucinations, nightmares, hostility, agitation, depression, and suicidal ideation.

The black box alert is not shared widely with physicians or is not taken seriously enough. And if you have received any prescription medication recently, you know that the many pages of drug information are often folded into teensy squares of extremely small print; it would be difficult to absorb all of it or to…