Targeted Small Airways Therapy in Persistent Asthma
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2018-06-25
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
The mainstay of asthma treatment is with inhaled steroids (commonly called a 'preventer') to
keep the symptoms of asthma under control. Increasing strengths of steroid inhaler may be
required in order to gain control of asthma, and this is usually guided both by symptoms and
simple measurements of lung function such as peak flow.
The airways (breathing tubes) in the lungs get smaller the further into the lungs they go.
Most simple measurements of lung function only reflect the larger 'central' airways and don't
provide information on the smaller 'peripheral' airways.Newer measurements have been
developed that can now give us accurate information on how the smaller airways are
working.Indeed the small airways seem to play a significant role in asthma in terms of
inflammation and airway narrowing.
Recently, new types of steroid inhalers have been developed that have a much smaller particle
size than other standard inhaled steroids.These have been shown to go deeper into the lungs,
thus getting into the smaller airways. There have been a few studies suggesting that this
might improve asthma control. However, we do not know if when small airway function is shown
to be abnormal, whether this improves with extra-fine particle inhaled steroids, nor whether
by improving small airway function specifically this translates into improved asthma control.
In this study we wish to study asthmatic patients who are not completely controlled on
standard particle size inhaled steroids, in addition to having evidence of abnormal small
airway function. By doing this we want to find out whether changing to the same dose of an
extra-fine particle inhaled steroid instead will improve asthma control by getting deeper
into the lungs and improving small airway function.