World Asthma Day was first launched in 1998 by the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) in collaboration with health care groups and asthma educators worldwide. It is held annually on the first Tuesday of May to raise awareness and improve asthma care globally. The event was created to bring attention to the rising prevalence of asthma, educate patients, and enhance management strategies to reduce the burden of the disease.

Key historical milestones:

1998 – First World Asthma Day: The inaugural event occurred in conjunction with the first World Asthma Meeting in Barcelona, Spain. Over 35 countries participated, marking the beginning of a global movement to increase awareness about asthma management.

GINA’s Role: GINA was instrumental in establishing World Asthma Day as part of its broader mission to reduce asthma-related health problems. The organization works with experts in respiratory health to issue guidelines and improve treatment practices globally.

Annual Themes: Since its inception, World Asthma Day has focused on specific themes aimed at enhancing asthma care. For example, themes like “You Can Control Your Asthma” and “Uncovering Asthma Misconceptions” highlight the need for patient empowerment and education.

Global Participation: Over the years, the event has grown to include participation from healthcare providers, schools, patient advocacy groups, and governments in many countries. Events typically include public education campaigns, free asthma screenings, and workshops to teach people how to manage asthma effectively.

World Asthma Day 2016 sees the RASP-UK partners celebrating the flying start to the project. Inspite of very safe and effective treatment, bronchial asthmatics do not respond well in 5 – 10% of cases which are labelled as Refractory Asthma. Besides compliance, presence of psychogenic and trigger factors and comorbid illness, steroid insensitiveness or resistance may play a significant role in the poorly controlled/ responding asthmatics. The UK Refractory Asthma Stratification Programme (RASP-UK) is exploring novel biomarker stratification strategies in severe asthma to improve clinical management and accelerate development of new therapies. Prior asthma mechanistic studies have not stratified on inflammatory phenotype and the understanding of pathophysiological mechanisms in asthma without Type 2 cytokine inflammation is limited.

RASP-UK objectively assesses adherence to corticosteroids and examines a novel composite biomarker strategy to optimise corticosteroid dose; we are also addressing what proportion of patients with severe asthma have persistent symptoms without eosinophilic airways inflammation after progressive corticosteroid withdrawal. The programme, that involves interactive partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry, is intended to facilitate access to stratified populations for novel therapeutic studies. The biostratification aspect of the project has already identified 46 patients, of which 27 have already been randomised into the study. As the project picks up speed we expect to see randomisation of a further seven patients next week.