Level of Asthma Controller Therapy Before Admission to the Hospital

In asthma, choice of controller therapy and adherence to treatment can affect the risk of future severe exacerbations leading to hospitalization.

Our objective was to characterize treatment dispensation profiles before hospital admission for asthma.

Using a 1/97th random sample of the national French claims data, patients with asthma aged 6 to 40 years were identified between 2006 and 2014. Patients with subsequent asthma-related hospitalization were selected. On the basis of controller therapy dispensed in the 12 months before admission, treatment profiles were categorized into clusters, using Ward's minimum-variance hierarchical clustering method.

Of 17,846 patients with asthma, we identified 275 patients (1.5%) with an asthma-related hospitalization. Three distinct clusters were identified. The first cluster (63.6%) included patients with few dispensations of any controller medication (<1 unit). The second cluster (32.4%) consisted of patients with frequent dispensations of long-acting beta agonists (LABAs)/inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) in fixed-dose combinations. The third cluster (4%) comprised patients receiving free combinations of ICS and LABAs, with more dispensations of LABAs than of ICS.

In France, before an asthma-related hospitalization, more than 60% of patients received little controller therapy and 4% were exposed to higher dispensation of LABAs than of ICS. These results indicate that a large fraction of asthma-related hospitalizations can potentially be prevented with better pharmacotherapy.