Chest
Clinical InvestigationsAsthmaControl of Asthma Under Specialist Care: Is It Achieved?
Section snippets
Subjects
Asthmatic patients who participated in the study were a random sample of patients who presented to asthma clinics of four Respiratory Medicine Departments in three large cities in Greece: Athens, Thessaloniki, and Ioannina. The majority of patients reviewed in these clinics come from within and around the above cities where 70% of the Greek population lives, while approximately 10% of the outpatients come from other areas in Greece. All patients (n = 437) who presented to these clinics on
Results
Review of the files and analysis of the questionnaires revealed the following results, which are structured in separate paragraphs. Control of asthma was assessed based on the type and frequency of symptoms, activity limitations, emergency visits, and patients’ perception of control.
Discussion
This report shows that the majority of asthma patients receiving specialist care experience symptoms and limitations in their physical and social activities and that > 40% of patients think that their asthma is not well controlled. In our group of patients, 94% received preventive medication, 78% are aware that they should step-up their use of medication in case of an exacerbation, and 91% reported having undergone spirometry and chest radiography. These data indicate that the goals of asthma
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2018, Respiratory MedicineCitation Excerpt :Among patients assessed by primary health care physicians in Canada, however, a substantial proportion have uncontrolled asthma (59%) [4]. Even among patients receiving specialist care, almost 50% do not achieve a sufficient level of control [5]. This is unfortunate because people with well controlled asthma can live relatively burden free compared to those with poorly controlled asthma.
The Prevalence of Severe Asthma and Low Asthma Control Among Danish Adults
2014, Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In PracticeCitation Excerpt :As mentioned earlier in the Discussion, general practice and specialist care is free of charge but referral to specialist care goes through the GP.28 Consequently, the lack of specialist management may be caused by inadequate and rare follow-up visits in general practice, which causes poor assessment of symptoms, rare lung function measurements, and a lack of patient education.9,38,39,41,48 Other contributing factors might be an overestimation of the level of asthma control by GPs and specialists9,39,46,49 but also the well-known tendency among patients with asthma to underestimate their level of asthma symptoms.38,39
Costs and health outcomes associated with primary vs secondary care after an asthma-related hospitalization: A population-based study
2013, ChestCitation Excerpt :Randomized trials comparing type of care and asthma-related outcomes have been criticized because they facilitated better access to care and education and more intense treatment to the specialist group, showing the practical challenges in the design of randomized experiments in this context.6,9 Among the previous observational studies,4,5,7,8,10,11 the report by Erickson et al10 is the most similar to our study. Compared with subjects who received no specialist visit after a baseline hospitalization, treatment by allergists or pulmonologists was not associated with a reduction in the risk of future ED visits for asthma.
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This study was supported by an unconditional grant from Merck Sharp and Dohme-Vianex Sa, Athens, Greece.