Source: Annual Congress 2002 - Asthma - Therapy and management -2
Disease area: Airway diseases

Abstract

In order to identify the pattern of maintenance medication use of patients with OAD thought by their physicians to be insufficiently controlled under their current treatment and hence a candidate for step-up or add-on therapy, GPs were asked to prospectively screen for such patients in their daily practice.
Methods & Results : 4461 such patients were identified, 90% of whom were considered to have moderately severe or severe OAD. 43% were classified as asthma, 35% as COPD and 21% could not be classified as either asthma or COPD. Use of maintenance medication, expressed as % of patients using the various drug classes, was as follows: (table 1)
Conclusions: compared to current guidelines for moderate-to-severe asthma, SABA and ICS (even though reaching a high %) are underprescribed, usage of both LABA and ALT is low and that of ACH is inappropriately high. In COPD, prescription rate of ACH and SABA is very similar indicating either monotherapy in all or combination therapy in only half of the patients. Use of ICS, (maintenance) OCS and ALT is inappropriately high compared to the guidelines. The overall pattern of use of maintenance therapy appears to be quite similar between patients classified as asthma and COPD, indicating that Belgian GPs treat both disorders quite indistinctly.

	Asthma	COPD
Antileukotrienes, oral (ALT)	14%	9%
Anticholinergics, inhaled (ACH)	28%	51%
SABA, inhaled	60%	49%
LABA, inhaled	20%	21%
Corticosteroids, inhaled (ICS)	78%	81%
Corticosteroids, oral (OCS)	10%	15%

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Citations should be made in the following way:
W. Vincken, P. Bartsch (Brussels, Liege, Belgium). Use of maintenance medications in patients with insufficiently controlled obstructive airway disease (OAD): the Belgian control survey. Eur Respir J 2002; 20: Suppl. 38, 411

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