INTRODUCING screening for asthma would help to significantly reduce incidents of asthma and save money, a leading international expert has said.
Prof Soren Pedersen said a screening policy for all schoolchildren in Finland had achieved remarkable results with the incidents of hospital admissions for asthma treatments being reduced by some 80 per cent.
Pedersen, a professor of paediatric respiratory medicine at the University of Southern Denmark at Odense, was speaking before he addressed a group of Irish GPs in Cork. He said the Finnish experience was based on introducing screening guidelines for asthma set out in the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA).
“We have implemented the guidelines locally in Denmark and I haven’t had any asthma admissions in my hospital for five years but in Finland, they introduced a programme with government support and you need that to get the fantastic results that they achieved,” he said.
Ireland has the fourth highest incidence of asthma worldwide and about 470,000 people, or one in eight of the population, are affected by the illness. It accounts for more than 5,000 hospital admissions every year.
Pedersen said international research over the past six or seven years had consistently shown that patients overestimate their level of asthma control. Many asthma sufferers said they had a good level of control, but in fact they were adapting and limiting their lifestyles to avoid asthmatic incidents.
“To have good control means to have a good quality of life – it means your risk of having an exacerbation or a hospitalisation is close to zero,” he said.
Doctors often overestimated the level of control because they didn’t ask the patients the right questions, Pedersen said. He advised introducing a screening system with a treadmill test for children at the age of six or seven to help identify those with asthma. “The international death rate for asthma is low; it’s one per 10,000 but what’s scary is that 80 per cent of those who died are not on medication or have been assessed as being so mild that they don’t require anything. It’s not those with severe asthma, which is what you would expect.”
He said the costs of asthma to society were all due to uncontrolled asthma because of work and school days lost and hospital visits. “Even if you balance this against the medication costs, good control still makes for a big saving for society,” Pedersen said.