About this video
Asthma cannot be cured, so the video classifies it by severity, using how many days a week symptoms or rescue medication are needed. It moves from intermittent through mild, moderate and severe persistent asthma, using a weekly calendar to show each category.
You'll be able to
- explain why asthma is classified by severity rather than cured
- place a patient's weekly pattern into intermittent, mild, moderate or severe
- justify the treatment implications of each severity level
Key words
- Intermittent asthma
- Symptoms occurring less than twice a week, needing rescue medication only occasionally.
- Mild persistent asthma
- Symptoms more than twice a week but not every day.
- Moderate asthma
- Symptoms basically every day, requiring rescue medication daily.
- Severe asthma
- Bad symptoms every day or more than once a day, with a major disruption to life.
- Rescue medication
- Fast-acting medication, such as an inhaler, used when symptoms occur.
Transcript
- [voiceover] Asthma is something that we cannot cure at this point in time, so we talk about how severe it is and think about the treatment in terms of how many times a week this person gets symptoms. So we've got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Out of the seven days of the week, the number of times they have their attacks or need their medication is basically how severe their disease is. First we have people who have it very mildly and they only get it intermittently. Intermittent, which means that they have it less than twice a week, so they need their medication basically only once a week.
Let's pick Wednesday. They have some trouble breathing, they take their medication, maybe an inhaler, and that's it, they're done. Let me just write that here. We've got less than twice a week, okay? That's our intermittent week. The next categories, the next three, are all persistent as opposed to intermittent.
Basically they happen more consistently. The first one of these is Mild. In mild asthma, the definition is that the symptoms occur more than twice a week but not enough to happen daily. If it happens daily and you need your rescue medication daily, that pushes you into the next category.
So more than twice a week, let's do Monday. How about Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday? That's a lot of days, but you notice never twice a day. At most, once a day and more than twice a week. The next one, going up in severity, we've got Moderate. Moderate.
That's basically daily, seven days a week. When the symptoms occur, people usually use their rescue inhalers or rescue medication, and they're moderate. That's every day. The last one, of course, is Severe. I'm going to use red, using a traffic light color system.
Severe is bad symptoms every day or more than once a day. So we've got bad symptoms every day. This is not just your usual one hit on the inhaler and done, but you might have asthma attacks, you might end up in the hospital, and on this day, they might have two of them.
Basically we should never let anybody walk around with this level of asthma, this completely seems like untreated. It's a huge disruption to their life. That's basically bad, severe asthma.
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