Our knowledge of the human body has steeped in the last decades but there are foundations still escaping our understanding, asthma development being one of them. The Lancet has published a consensus opinion from key European neurologists to assess why progress in reducing hospitalisations and mortality due to asthma has stalled since a decade. In their commission, called “After asthma: redefining airways diseases,” there is self-criticism and determination to advance and better shape the systems science has created to treat these disease, to reduce patients suffering, unpredictability and economic costs.
The Lancet Commission on Asthma is calling for a revolution. Commissioners recommend to leave behind the conception of asthma as a unique and box disease, and to deconstruct airways diseases into traits that differ from patient to patient, including social and environmental factors and extra-pulmonary comorbidities. This can result in a more personalised treatment to clinically predict the patient’s evolution thanks to asthma therapy.
Linked to this definition of each patients’ asthma, the Commissioners call for the revision of asthma guidelines (adopted 27 years ago) so that the measurement of the traits becomes the fundamental marker to define treatment. Guidelines should therefore be more accurate and specific. Moreover, they recommend to become more empirical when measuring the success of a treatment, and to measure the changes in asthma defining traits to determine treatment results.
Most importantly, they acknowledge how asthma has been understood to date as a chronic disease that should be controlled rather than cured, and therefore they call to be more ambitions and commit to develop treatment approaches that focus on prevention and not only on cure.
This paper confirms a new trend in the conception of asthma that we, asthma patients, encourage, especially if it enables more patient participation in research and the inclusion of patient reported outcomes.
Access the full After Asthma commission here.