The authors found no clinically important improvements in a range of clinical indices of asthma control measures despite expected changes in serum lipids.
In a large clinical trial, improvements in most clinical asthma control measures occurred with either fluticasone or montelukast; but outcomes, especially F eNO, improved significantly more with fluticasone than with montelukast treatment (Zeiger et al. 2006).
This allows adjustment of the dosage of inhaled corticosteroids based on information of airways inflammation whilst the dosage of additional reliever medication is based on asthma control measures [ 21].
We also computed area under the curve (AUC) (GraphPad Prism 5, GraphPad Software Inc., San Diego, CA, USA) using the period weeks 5 16 as an alternative summary variable for PD20AMP and each asthma control measure to ensure that we did not miss an effect if the measurements taken at the end of the study had been spurious.
The primary outcome measure is change in asthma control measured using the Asthma Control Questionnaire (ACQ).
Exposure to higher levels (> 5.6 ng lipopolysaccharide/mL) was associated with poorer asthma control measured by symptoms, medication use, and lung function.
The primary end point was the cost to achieve an additional person meeting the asthma control measure during the outcome year.
The revised asthma control measure incorporating SABA use was achieved by 2,289 (37%), 584 (42%), and 610 (40%) of patients in the MDI, BAI, and DPI cohorts, respectively (P ≤ 0.001).
The asthma control measure was achieved during the outcome year by 29,961 (75%), 7,518 (77%), and 5,307 (78%) patients in MDI, BAI, and DPI cohorts, respectively (P ≤ 0.001).
The revised asthma control measure incorporating SABA use was achieved by 21,956 (55%), 5,605 (57%), and 4,185 (62%) of patients in MDI, BAI, and DPI cohorts, respectively (P ≤ 0.001).
A second composite, the 'revised asthma control measure', which approximates to the well controlled asthma status in the GINA guidelines, 32 incorporated an additional parameter, namely: 4) average daily prescribed dose of salbutamol of ≤200 μg (or terbutaline ≤500 μg).
