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Personalising Severe Asthma Care Through Shared Decision-Making
People living with severe asthma often face daily symptoms, unexpected flare-ups, and side effects from treatment, despite major advances in asthma care. While new therapies have improved outcomes for many people, it is clear that severe asthma is not the same for everyone. What works for one person may not work for another.
This is the challenge Eleanor and her team sought to address through the Asthma Australia-funded project, Treatable Traits shared decision-making in severe asthma: a digital decision-making toolkit to help people with severe asthma make more informed decisions about their care.
Moving Beyond a One-Size-Fits-All Approach
Traditionally, severe asthma has often been managed using similar treatment pathways for most patients. However, experts now understand that severe asthma is a complex condition influenced by a range of factors that vary from person to person.
A newer approach, known as Treatable Traits, recognises these differences. Instead of focusing solely on an asthma diagnosis, the Treatable Traits approach identifies the specific factors affecting an individual and targets them with personalised treatment strategies.
These traits may include:
- Other health conditions, such as obesity
- Lifestyle and environmental risk factors, such as smoking
- Self-management challenges, such as inhaler technique or medication adherence
Research has already shown that addressing these individual traits can improve asthma control and quality of life for people with severe asthma.
Putting Patients at the Centre of Care
While identifying treatable traits is an important step, people with severe asthma often have multiple traits that could be addressed. Managing all of these at once may not always be practical or meaningful for the individual.
Eleanor’s research aims to help solve this problem by supporting shared decision-making between people with severe asthma and their healthcare professionals. Shared decision-making is a collaborative process that ensures treatment choices reflect both clinical evidence and the goals, preferences, and priorities of the person living with asthma. This allows both the person and their healthcare professional to contribute to decisions about which aspects of care are most important to address.
The project developed a prototype Treatable Traits Shared Decision-Making Toolkit to support conversations between people with severe asthma and their healthcare professionals, helping them identify, discuss and decide together which treatable o traits are most important to focus on first.
Learn more about Dr Eleanor Majellano’s research and how the Treatable Traits approach could help personalise care for people with severe asthma.
