Prof. Marcus Butler

It's a very common condition.

I mean, overall, it's probably 8% of the population.

Eight out of every 100 people you'll see wandering around a shopping centre, for example.

It's more common in children, as we all tend to think of it that way.

But it's certainly the most common long-term lung disease we see outside of smokers in adults also.

So asthma is a long term condition where there is variable symptoms over time that come and go.

And it's due to swelling and inflammation and sensitivity in the airways to all manner of exposures in the environment that trigger or set off this swelling.

such as exercise and viruses and air quality and infections like viruses and results in the typical symptoms that come and go over time of cough and breathlessness and wheeze and chest tightness.

So along the lines of what Lucy just said, when symptoms are intruding into your everyday life and you can't function, you're missing work or you have presenteeism in work, you're not really there with it because of your symptoms annoying you, you're missing activities like sports, you're waking up at night.

All of these symptoms are signs that all is not well with your asthma.

When you're looked after well, you should be symptom-free.

And in the asthma society, we're pushing to try and encourage achieving that state by a wider availability of special treatment called MART treatment, which in simple language is an inhaler that has everything you need in a one-stop shop inhaler, rather than relying on lots of different types of confusing inhalers to treat bits of symptoms here and there.

We would prefer a very streamlined, one-size-fits-all inhaler known as MART.

It comes in different brands, which you take...

a little bit of every day all year round to stay well and you top up with the exact same inhaler when your symptoms intrude into your life because at the moment people tend to use different inhalers yes at different times and they often resort to blue inhalers I won't mention brand names but it would be well known to asthma patients the ones we're talking about

And these are a double edged sword.

They're a trap because if you rely on those, you allow inflammation to run riot.

And even in mild asthma, we know that MART is superior because in mild asthma, people often won't take their treatment every day.

They'll only take treatment when they think they need it.

And when they reach for these blue inhalers on that basis, they'll end up in hospital much more often than if they just from time to time use their MART inhaler.