COPD and asthma “labels”?

Monday February 1st, 2016

A new “radical” approach to patient management should be introduced that identifies “treatable traits” rather than labelling someone as having asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, respiratory experts claim today (1 February, 2016).

Professor Alvar Agusti, associate professor of medicine at the University of Barcelona, said defining a patient's symptoms using historical diagnostic labels is an outdated approach to understanding an individual's condition.

Writing a perspective article in European Respiratory Journal, Prof Agusti and colleagues said a more radical approach towards a personalised approach that treatable traits is more appropriate because there are a growing number of patients who do not fit neatly into COPD or asthma categories, including patients with adult-onset asthma, smoking asthmatics, or patients with the so-called asthma-COPD overlap syndrome.

“We propose a label-free precision medicine approach based on treatable traits that categorise the clinical and biological complexity of airway disease,” he says.

“The approach we are suggesting would radicalise healthcare and have significant implications for the organisation of a healthcare system. By recognising the clinical and biological complexity of a disease, we can use causal mechanistic disease pathways to adopt a more precise approach, which is hopefully more effective at managing patients with these conditions."

New technologies over the past 30 years have enabled clinicians to observe a patient and define that patient's condition.

They can access information about a range of other underlying complex biological traits, including cellular and molecular traits.

Agusti A, Bel E, Thomas M et al. Treatable traits: toward precision medicine of chronic airway diseases. European Respiratory Journal. January 2016. DOI: 10.1183/13993003.01359-2015

Tags: Allergies & Asthma | Europe | Respiratory

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