A recent survey in Spanish patients with asthma and other respiratory diseases found that adults often underestimate the severity of their disease leading to more complications and avoidable emergencies. 

In the survey report, published in the Clinical Respiratory Journal, investigators said that they analysed a database of more than 84,000 adults living in Spain in order to send out an initial survey questionnaire and selected almost 600 people to extend the full survey. They found that the vast majority of patients with severe asthma did not realize their cases qualified as such. Just 2 percent considered their asthma to be severe, while 52 percent said their cases were “mild.”

Even as the world has about 400 million people suffering from asthma and the number is still on the rise, there is very little knowledge about the patients’ perspective of the disease, said the lead researcher Eusebi Chiner, MD, PhD, of the Hospital Universitari Sant Joan d’Alacant in Spain. So, his study was aimed to obtain a comprehensive picture of patient needs, evaluate their knowledge, source of information, and perception of the severity of their asthma, and compare these variables between severe and non-severe asthma patients.