Asthma can be hard to control. Different things set off attacks, different types of inflammation cause the same symptoms, and not all inflammation can be reduced by corticosteroids.
The problem is that asthma treatment hasn’t focused on what’s causing the symptoms. So the treatment tends to be the same, regardless of what was going on inside the airways. But establishing the cause or type of asthma has until recently been difficult because there’s been no easy way of testing for inflammation.
Now with exhaled NO testing, doctors can get straight to the cause. And they can also decide if the reason some patients don’t get better is because they’re not taking the medication properly or if it’s because the symptoms aren’t due to asthma in the first place.
There is now an easy and fast test that doctors can use to tell what type of airway inflammation people with asthma suffer from. When they know the nature of the inflammation, they can confidently prescribe the right treatment to the patient.
Testing for exhaled NO, was discovered about 15 years ago and the testing method has been perfected ever since.
Until exhaled NO measuring became available, there was no simple, easy-to-use test for the routine management of asthma.
It is worth remembering that diagnosing any disease is a complex process and doctors will need to rely on more than one test to reach their conclusions. For asthma, there are traditional tests but they do not inform about inflammation.