There are common problems in lung disease which are viewed as peculiar to the US but when physicians study these problems globally, we often find that, while the same disease may be present around the world, specific issues may be different. This is certainly true about the common lung disease asthma.
I have written many times before about the fact that in the current state of medicine, asthma is not a curable disease, but it can be controlled. Since this is a genetically transmitted disease, patients may have varying degrees of symptoms. However, all asthma patients will experience, at one time or another, a flair up of their disease we call an exacerbation. If we study asthma globally, we find that individuals with similar patient characteristics but coming from different parts of the world have varied exacerbation risks even after controlling for patient and disease characteristics.
Some of the reasons for these differences may be due to the local climate, for example, sand storms in Saudi Arabia or a less robust health care system in Colombia. These factors only partially account for the observed differences.
Globally, this means that two similar patients with the same exacerbation history from two different countries might be at different risks for the next serious flair up of their asthma.
This type of understanding may not immediately help the average patient in our community but can provide important information about the optimum treatment for asthma not only in the US but around the world.
