Texting Helps Teens Remember Meds

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- 4gt yr meds? Getting kids to remember their medicine may be a text message away.

- Ohio doctors are experimenting with texting to tackle a big problem: Tweens and teens too often do a lousy job of controlling chronic illnesses such as asthma, diabetes or kidney disease

- 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.