Clinical Medicine Reviews in Therapeutics

Moderate to severe chronic asthma in children provides challenges in both diagnosis and treatment for paediatricians. The clinician treating difficult to control asthma meets a number of challenges such as non-adherence and paucity of strong clinical evidence. Understanding different asthma phenotypes, pathophysiology and the inflammatory process that underpins asthma is essential in order to appreciate the action of the pharmacotherapies available for use beyond the British Thoracic Society Guidelines. Many of the newer drugs used today are inspired by other inflammatory diseases. Through this review we have summarised these issues for the reader and outlined the emerging therapies that may be available in the future.