'Difficult-to-treat asthma' may be due to difficult-to-trea...(adherence only became apparent using a c...),Health

Date:10/22/2009

adherence only became apparent using a combination of surrogate and objective measures," said Dr. Heaney. "Of these patients who were referred for assessment and treatment of difficult asthma, many are actually not taking their treatment as prescribed, which would suggest an important first course of action in assessing difficult asthma may actually be verifying the patient's adherence to his or her treatment protocol. Determining whether the patient is taking medications as prescribed is of utmost importance before moving to more aggressive and expensive treatments. It is also crucially important in understanding true refractory disease and assessing responses to novel therapies, either in clinical trials or clinical practice."

Some patient characteristics were more strongly associated with nonadherence than others: women were less likely to be adherent than men, a finding that had been previously identified, but that Dr. Heaney cites as needing more investigation.

Another red flag may be a lower score on quality of life measures. Dr. Heaney and colleagues found that patients who filled fewer than half of their prescribed ICT scored significantly lower on the EuroQol and the Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire. Furthermore, the number of prior hospital admissions within the past 12 months was significantly associated with non-adherence.

"In general, one might expect in more severe disease that a very poor asthma quality of life score suggesting high morbidity, would perhaps, result in better adherence, " said Dr. Heaney. "The same could be said for hospital admission, but the reasons for non-adherence are complex. However for clinicians, multiple hospital admissions should definitely flag probable non-adherence in difficult-to-treat cases."

"Non-adherence is a common problem, which is often hard to detect. In general, asking the patient or relying on clinical impression is useless, and objective or good surrogate measures shou
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Contact: Keely Savoie ksavoie@thoracic.org 212-305-8620 American Thoracic Society Source:Eurekalert

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