Monitoring asthma: current knowledge and future perspectives

Asthma is a heterogeneous chronic respiratory disease. For many years, clinicians have classified and managed it according to severity. However, disease severity is largely affected by several external factors. Therefore, it has been recommended that ideal asthma management should primarily aim to achieve and maintain disease control. However, despite effective therapeutic options, a large proportion of patients do not manage to achieve satisfactory asthma control, often due to lack of adequate compliance. Poorly controlled asthma is associated with a relevant socioeconomic burden in terms of mortality, morbidity, quality of life and healthcare costs, in both adult and pediatric patients. Careful and constant disease monitoring therefore assumes a crucial role in allowing treatment adjustments and ensuring that therapy goals are met. This article provides a review of the currently available outcomes to monitor asthma control, as well as of innovative solutions to improve asthma management in the near future.