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Prof. Helen Reddel
Many patients with mild asthma remain complacent and confused about how best to manage their condition, having often received conflicting treatment advice from clinicians, an Australian-led study suggests.
The qualitative research also found most patients preferred a regimen of as-needed budesonide-formoterol over maintenance inhaled corticosteroids after they had been initiated on the combination treatment.
Speaking to 74 patients with doctor-diagnosed mild asthma with no recent hospitalisations, the researchers reported most were relatively unconcerned about the condition, with one describing it as a “mild annoyance”.
Many also took a casual approach to treatment, found the study led by researchers at Sydney’s Woolcock Institute of Medical Research.
“In our interviewees, there was generally limited knowledge about asthma, and a tendency to believe that their personal asthma risk was low,” they reported in BMJ Open.
This was linked to often vague and changing advice from GPs and pharmacists.
“Everyone is complacent,” said one interviewee.
“I mean me, my GP, the pharmacist and even my husband … medical professionals don’t treat mild asthma seriously. They think ‘you’ll be right. Just take Ventolin’. There’s no follow up.”
The interviews with patients from Australia, New Zealand and the UK were conducted at the end of the 12-month NovelSTART RCT into patients’ attitudes toward two different ICS-containing regimens: maintenance twice-daily budesonide (200 µg) plus as-needed salbutamol, or as-needed combination budesonide-formoterol (200/6 µg).