Difficult-to-Control Asthma Management in Adults

The management of difficult-to-control asthma remains a significant challenge, which frequently requires the input of the wider multidisciplinary team. This review covers the importance of systematic assessment, phenotyping, treatment options at step 4, an overview of biologics and novel therapies for type 2 (T2) inflammation, and nonpharmacological interventions. Once people have been identified as suffering from difficult-to-control asthma, it is important to use the systematic assessment process to allow accurate diagnosis and optimization of adherence as well as identification and treatment of any relevant comorbidities. Before initiating a biologic, it is important to optimize inhaled therapies and sufficiently phenotype individual patients to allow for the logical use of biologic agents targeting T2 inflammation. For patients who either do not have evidence of T2 inflammation or remain symptomatic despite biologics, attention should be paid to the available nonpharmacological interventions. Difficult-to-treat asthma remains an area of significant unmet need, but improvements in models of service delivery and the ongoing pharmacological pipeline are causes for significant optimism that sooner rather than later there will no longer be asthmatic patients who are difficult to treat.