Abstract
Asthma is a heterogeneous airway disease with various clinical phenotypes. It is crucial to clearly identify clinical phenotypes to achieve better asthma management.
We used cluster analysis to classify the clinical groups of 724 asthmatic patients from the Cohort for Reality and Evolution of Adult Asthma in Korea (COREA), and in 1843 subjects from another independent Korean asthma cohort of Soonchunhyang University Asthma Genome Research Centre (SCH) (Bucheon, Republic of Korea). Hierarchical cluster analysis was performed by Ward's method, followed by κ-means cluster analysis.
Cluster analysis of the COREA cohort indicated four asthma subtypes: 1) smoking asthma; 2) severe obstructive asthma; 3) early-onset atopic asthma; and 4) late-onset mild asthma. An independent cluster analysis of the SCH cohort also indicated four clusters that were similar to the COREA clusters.
Our results indicate that adult Korean asthma patients can be classified into four distinct clusters.
Footnotes
This article has supplementary material available from www.erj.ersjournals.com
For editorial comments see page 1247.
Support Statement
This study was supported by grants from the Korea Health 21 R&D Project (grant numbers A090548 and A102065) (Ministry of Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, Seoul, Republic of Korea) to C-S. Park, H-B. Moon and Y.S. Cho.
Statement of Interest
None declared.
- Received June 13, 2011.
- Accepted September 29, 2012.
- ©ERS 2013
