Question
What are the goals of long-term asthma care?
Answer
The goals of long-term asthma care include decreasing impairment and decreasing risk to the patient. Let’s look at each of these more closely.
Decrease Impairment
One of the goals of long-term asthma care, identified by the EPR-3 report in 2007, is to decrease impairment. We want to prevent symptoms such as coughing or breathlessness day or night or after exercise. We want to decrease the need for a patient to use their quick-relief inhaler to less than two times per week. We want to maintain near normal pulmonary function studies, and we want patients to maintain normal activity levels. We want those individuals to be able to do whatever activity they so desire and do it safely. We also want to meet the patient and family's expectations of and satisfaction with asthma care. We are going to do that through education.
Decrease Risk
We also want to decrease risks, including exacerbations and emergency room visits or hospitalizations. We want to give patients the proper medications that address inflammation so in order to prevent the loss of lung function in adults and lack of lung growth in children. We also want to provide optimal drug therapy with few or no adverse side effects. We want to give just the right amount of medication with few or no side effects.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Current Guidelines in Asthma Management Across all Age Groups, presented by Nancy Nathenson, BS, RRT.
