Asthma in General practice: risk factors and asthma control.

Abstract

Asthma is a chronic, inflammatory, pulmonary disease with a significant impact on patients, their families, and society. When symptomatic asthma is diagnosed, often irreversible changes in the airways have occurred. Therefore it is important to detect persons at high risk of asthma as early as possible. The studies described in this thesis show that certain groups with an allergy or allergic rhinitis ('hay fever') are more at risk for an asthma diagnosis than persons without these features. On the other hand, having asymptomatic bronchial hyperresponsiveness in adolescence did not increase the risk for an asthma diagnosis. Appropriate treatment usually results in the achievement of good asthma control. Unfortunately, in a large proportion of the asthma patients this is not the case. There are indications that patients and their physicians overestimate the level of asthma control. This underlines the need for a tool that can measure asthma control in order to identify those asthma patients that are in need of medical attention. In this thesis studies are described that show that the Asthma Control Questionnaire (ACQ) is able to differentiate between patients with good, suboptimal, and poor asthma control