Little is known about the distribution of asthma severity in men and women in the general population. The objective of our study was to describe asthma severity and change in severity according to gender in a cohort of adult asthmatics. Subjects with asthma were identified from random samples of the 22 to 44 year-olds from the general population, screened for asthma from to in 48 centers from 22 countries and followed-up during β, as part of the European Community Respiratory Health Survey ECRHS.
All participants to follow-up with current asthma at baseline were eligible for the analysis. To assess change over the follow-up, asthma severity at the two surveys was defined using standardized data on respiratory symptoms, lung function and medication according to the Global Initiative for Asthma GINA Guidelines. Another quantitative score Ronchetti further considering hospitalizations was also analysed.
The study included subjects with asthma followed-up over a mean period of 8. At baseline, asthma severity according to GINA was distributed as intermittent: Whatever the classification, there was no significant difference in the severity distribution between men and women.
There was also no gender difference in the severity distribution among incident cases which developed asthma between the two surveys. Men with moderate-to-severe asthma at baseline were more likely than women to have moderate-to-severe asthma at follow-up. Using GINA, Using Ronchetti score, There was no gender difference in asthma severity at the two surveys.
However, our findings suggest that asthma severity might be less stable in women than in men. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
