Addressing the misdiagnosis of asthma in adults: where does it go wrong?

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Asthma is diagnosed based on patients’ respiratory symptoms of wheeze, cough, chest tightness and/or dyspnea together with physiologic evidence of variable and reversible expiratory airflow limitation. A high prevalence of overdiagnosis, underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis of adult asthma has been reported in the literature.

Areas covered: Misdiagnosis of asthma in adults can occur in the community due to physicians’ failure to confirm airflow limitation using spirometry, the relatively poor sensitivity of spirometry to absolutely rule in asthma, the complexity of multiple asthma phenotypes and endotypes, and the inherent day to day variability of asthma symptoms and airflow limitation. Consequences of asthma misdiagnosis to the patient and to the healthcare system include increased medication costs, increased potential side effects related to unnecessary use of medications and lost opportunities to diagnose the true cause of patients’ respiratory symptoms.

Expert commentary: Here we provide a review of the problem of misdiagnosis of adult asthma and suggestions for how to decrease the risk of misdiagnosis.

KEYWORDS:

• Asthma
• misdiagnosis
• pulmonary function testing
• diagnostics
• remission
• lung health
• epidemiology

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.