Triggers in adult asthma: are patients aware of triggers and doing right?

BACKGROUND: As triggers have a potential to induce asthma exacerbations, awareness of the patients to individual triggers as well as protective measures might be helpful to prevent asthma attacks. Though allergens and allergen avoidance have been studied extensively, there are only few studies on non-allergic triggers and their avoidance for adult patients with asthma. In this study, we wanted to investigate asthma triggers and compliance to the preventive measures in an adult population.
METHODS: One hundred and thirty one adult asthma patients were enrolled into the study. A face to face interview was done by using a questionnaire including individual asthma triggers, prevention measures against major modifiable triggers and knowledge sources of the cases.
RESULTS: Regardless of asthma severity, 59.5 % of the subjects reported to be triggered by more than 10 factors. The most common triggers were air pollutants (89.3 %) and weather changes (81.7 %). Severe group was more frequently affected by medications, emotional stress, weather changes and indoor pollutants than other severity groups (p=0.017, 0.014, 0.049 and 0.018, respectively) whereas stress was reported more frequently by females than males. Prevention measures were insufficient regarding some major triggers.
CONCLUSION: Adult patients are vulnerable to several triggers regardless from underlying severity of the illness. Insufficient compliance to the major preventive measures indicates that new strategies are needed to prevent asthma attacks caused by modifiable triggers.