MedWire News: Patients with co-occurring asthma and rhinitis tend to experience less frequent respiratory symptoms than those with asthma alone, Danish study results suggest.
Writing in the journal Allergy, Jacob Hansen (University of Copenhagen) and team explain: “Asthma and rhinitis often co-occur, and this potentially increases the disease severity and impacts negatively on the quality of life.”
However, they add that “having symptoms from both the nose and lungs may increase the motivation to comply with treatment regimens. As a consequence, those with double disease might therefore have a significantly better treatment and better asthma control.”
To investigate, the researchers studied 182 patients with asthma, 362 with rhinitis, and 334 with both asthma and rhinitis who were aged an average of 29 years.
All the participants were interviewed about their prescribed treatments and the severity and frequency of their respiratory symptoms. They also completed a quality-of-life questionnaire and underwent skin prick and lung function test, as well as a methacholine challenge test.
Analysis revealed that there were no differences in rhinitis symptom severity between patients with asthma and rhinitis compared with those with rhinitis alone.
Overall, 59% of the participants with asthma had persistent symptoms. However, just 55.1% of patients with both asthma and rhinitis had persistent asthma compared with 66.3% of those with asthma alone.
Conversely, patients with both asthma and rhinitis had more severe airway hyper-responsiveness to the methacholine challenge test than those with asthma alone.
The researchers also found that participants with rhinitis and those with both asthma and rhinitis were more likely to have a positive skin prick test result (81 and 72%, respectively) than patients with asthma alone (23%).
Furthermore, while patients with rhinitis alone had significantly better lung function that those in the other groups, patients with both asthma and rhinitis had similar lung function compared with patients with asthma alone.
There were no significant differences in asthma-specific quality of life between the groups, whereas rhinitis-specific quality of life was worse in those with both asthma and rhinitis compared with those with rhinitis alone.
The researchers also note that asthma and rhinitis were undertreated in 85% of the participants overall.
Hansen and team conclude: “We encourage that these observations be used in the evaluation and treatment of patients with asthma and rhinitis and that they contribute to the understanding of asthma and rhinitis as a uniform airways disease.”
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