Variability in the diagnosis of occupational asthma and implications for clinical practice

The purpose of this review is to provide a summary of recent evidence relating to occupational asthma diagnosis.

Recent evidence suggests that whilst prolonged asthmagen exposure worsens the prognosis, many steps in the diagnostic process are problematic for workers with possible occupational asthma. Certain workers suffer delay prior to specialist assessment, and assessment itself may be of variable quality. Emerging evidence suggests that whilst experts agree about certain aspects of case assessment, there is still likely to be variation in clinical practice. Implications of this variation for the workers assessed are relatively under researched.

Future research needs to focus not only on improving diagnostic testing, but also on improving consistency and agreement over diagnosis.