No signs of asthma found in third of adults diagnosed with it

For those diagnosed with asthma within the past five years, a JAMA study has found a current diagnosis could not be established in about one third of supposed asthma sufferers. We talked to the study's lead author, Shawn Aaron from the University of Ottawa, to find out what doctors and patients should do to ensure they're not getting misdiagnosed. ResearchGate: Could you briefly introduce your study and findings? Shawn Aaron: Our study set out to determine how often we could confirm or alternatively rule out active asthma in adults who had recently been diagnosed by physicians. We recruited 701 adults who had been diagnosed with asthma within the past five years from the community. We brought them into our labs and ran extensive lung function tests on them to try to prove asthma. If we could not show evidence of asthma, we then had the patients start to taper their asthma medications and kept following them and re-testing them with bronchial provocation tests to try to show asthma. We also sent them to a pulmonologist to try to determine if there were other explanations for their symptoms apart from asthma. Ultimately, 33 percent of the participants were found not to have active asthma, despite being completely off medications. RG: Why do you think you were unable to find asthma in so many previously diagnosed patients? Aaron: There are two reasons for this. Firstly, some patients were misdiagnosed in the community - meaning they never had asthma to begin with. Secondly, ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news