Understanding and Taking Control of your Condition…. May is National Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month

Close to 25 million American’s have asthma and 60% of cases are related to “allergic-asthma”. May is the peak of the season for allergy and asthma sufferers. While many of us are quite happy that “spring ” is in the air, it’s not always something that asthma and allergy sufferers celebrate.

In recognition of World Asthma Day (May 6, 2014) and National Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month, the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (NAEPP) is urging people to learn about the disease and the best methods to care of it. One of the first steps—whether you have asthma or know someone who does—is to develop a written asthma action plan (AAP) in partnership with your healthcare provider. AAPs that meet the specific needs of a patient include details ranging from how to take medication to reduce airway inflammation, to ways to reduce environmental triggers of asthma such as dust mites or tobacco smoke.

But AAPs don’t stand alone.

They are part of a comprehensive approach needed to improve asthma care and control. Like diabetes or high blood pressure, managing asthma symptoms requires daily attention and ongoing education. “It is important to formulate and follow an asthma action plan with your pediatrician or family medicine physician,” states Vicky Alexander, RN FNC-P, Houston Healthcare Community Education Chronic Disease Management Supervisor. “This plan is a helpful aid to have in the event that an asthma or “asthma-like” attack should occur.”

An APP is just one of the following six key actions, recommended by the NAEPP, that clinicians, patients, and all others who touch the life of someone with asthma can work together on to seize control of asthma so that asthma doesn’t seize control of asthma patients.

• Use inhaled corticosteroids to control asthma if you have persistent asthma. Your doctor will help you choose the best treatment.

• Use a written asthma action plan to highlight two things: 1) what to do daily to control your asthma, and 2) how to handle symptoms or asthma attacks.

• Assess asthma severity at the initial visit to determine what treatment to start to get your asthma under control.

• Assess and monitor how well controlled your asthma is at follow up visits. Your doctor may need to increase or decrease your medicine to keep asthma under control.

• Schedule follow-up visits at periodic intervals, and at least every six months.

• Control environmental exposures such as allergens or irritants that worsen your asthma.

When taken with these other actions, AAPs can help people with asthma live without limits. The NAEPP has identified personalized AAPs as “must-haves” for all asthma patients, particularly those with moderate and severe asthma, a history of asthma attacks, or poorly controlled asthma.

Currently, only about one in three patients with asthma has an AAP to guide them. So, for World Asthma Day and throughout Asthma Awareness Month, the NAEPP encourages those without an AAP to get one.

It takes an entire community—people from all sectors—to help create the type of care and environments that will make it easier for the one in 12 Americans who has asthma to breathe more easily and live life more fully.

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