Using the asthma control test to improve asthma outcomes.

There is a major gap between what can be achieved with modern asthma management and what is currently being achieved. One of the main reasons for this is a lack of recognition of asthma control and the requirement for more effective treatment-it is only through identifying those patients with uncontrolled asthma that appropriate treatment will be prescribed. In part, the difficulty in the assessment of control relates to the lack of a clear therapeutic target in asthma. This contrasts with other chronic diseases such as hypertension or diabetes where treatment is prescribed in order to achieve a definite therapeutic target. One approach to this difficulty is to develop a simple test which is a screening tool to identify patients with poorly controlled asthma. The Asthma Control Test (ACT) has been developed and validated for this purpose. It involves patients completing a simple written questionnaire of 5 questions, from which a score (out of 25) is obtained. It has been shown that the ACT is a simple, quick and accurate tool for assessing asthma control and it has been shown to be responsive to changes in asthma control over time. It can easily be incorporated into the routine assessment of patients with asthma and enable busy healthcare professionals to more easily identify patients whose asthma control can be improved, enabling changes to their management to be made and thereby improve outcomes.