Respiratory medicine experts have called for an overhaul of how asthma and other airways diseases are categorised and treated.

Launching new recommendations in a specially commissioned article in The Lancet at the European Respiratory Society conference in Milan, Italy, the team of  leading experts say the current approach to asthma and airways diseases is outdated and has delivered all it can.

Instead we need a new taxonomy of airway disease based on treatable traits, co-author and University of Oxford Professor of Respiratory Medicine Ian Pavord told delegates.

The 23 member international group say that the simplistic concept of disease, and the assumption that all asthmas are the same, nearly resulted in the “considerable clinical benefits” of corticosteroids and mepolizumab being missed.

“We believe that these entrenched concepts are the most important causes of the stagnation in key clinical outcomes observed in the past 10 years despite ever increasing spending on asthma treatment,” they say.

Want to know more?

In this podcast you can listen to Professor Pavord and Professor Andrew Bush discuss the need for a new approach to prevent, manage, and cure asthma.