Inhalers deliver medicine straight to the airways, which is why they work quickly at low doses. They fall into two broad jobs. Relievers (short-acting bronchodilators) open the airways within minutes during an attack. Preventers — inhaled corticosteroids, long-acting bronchodilators, and the combination inhalers that pair them — are taken every day to reduce the underlying inflammation and keep the airways open. Most modern asthma and COPD treatment is about getting the preventer right.
The facts on this page are pulled directly from official U.S. FDA datasets — they are not written from memory. Each field below names the dataset it came from, so you can check it yourself.
Plain-English summaries and drug-class explainers are written and reviewed by the Priya Life Science editorial team, led by Sreepriya Prasannan (MSc Digital Transformation of Life Sciences (Innopharma Education / Griffith College); MSc & BSc Botany). Data is retrieved automatically from the sources above and cross-checked with AI-assisted verification (Anthropic's Claude) — brand and generic names are matched against the exact FDA product record so that a combination product or a different formulation cannot be mistaken for the drug on this page. An editor reviews the result before publication. We describe this in full in our editorial standards and corrections policy. The FDA data on this page was last retrieved on 28 Aug 2026.