[Asthma in clinical practice: from inflammatory phenotypes to personalized treatment]

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the airways. Classification of asthma in different phenotypes has therapeutic implications and may lead to personalized medicine. Induced sputum is the gold standard for asthma phenotyping but is complex, time-consuming and not widely available. The combination of different biomarkers such as exhaled nitric oxide, blood eosinophils and total serum IgE levels allows the prediction of inflammatory phenotype in 58% of asthmatic patients when sputum is not available. We recently demonstrated the interest of measuring volatile organic compounds in exhaled breath to phenotype asthma. These compounds could play an important role in the future to predict the response to expensive biologicals available in severe asthma to reduce exacerbations and the use of systemic corticosteroids.