Page 46 - Comprehensive treatment of patients with glucocorticoid-dependent severe asthma

Chapter 2
technique checked, aggravating factors eliminated, and the clinical phenotype with its specific markers of severity defined. When keeping the three most common clinical phenotypes of severe asthma in mind (early onset severe allergic asthma, late onset non-atopic eosinophilic asthma, and late onset obese female asthma), clinicians will be able to recognize the markers of asthma severity, and attune the treatment to it.
Current treatment of severe asthma is based on clinical markers of severity, but in the near future the focus will be on finding composite genetic and molecular markers that will be coupled to specific asthma phenotypes. Ongoing studies in patients with severe asthma using systems biology will certainly reveal new molecular targets that will be used to develop highly specific therapies [192]. Hopefully, such personalized medicine will improve the lives of patients with the most severe disease.
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