Date:07/05/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/05/07/stories/2008050760131000.htm

Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Doctor advocates ‘attack’ on asthma

HYDERABAD: Vyakaranam Nageshwar, an interventional pulmonologist, has advocated the need for ‘attacking asthma before it attacks you’, on the occasion of the World Asthma Day on Tuesday.

Talking to presspersons here, he maintained that the biggest problem in asthma management is lack of proper information about various aspects of the disease among patients as also practitioners. Keeping this in view, Dr. Nageshwar has been maintaining records of 100 patients he had screened.

The records show the activities of the patients every half-an-hour for a period of 30 days.

They enable both doctors and patients to decide the mode of treatment based on the identified individualised allergy causing asthma. He described such records as a unique mode of strategy wherein the patient decides the method of treatment. “After 30 days he knows the cause of the attack and gets awareness”.

Educating patient

Patient education or advice about asthma management in the country is inadequate as only two per cent of physicians were able to answer the queries regarding their patients in a convincing manner, he claimed quoting a study involving 1,400 doctors.

Dr. Nageshwar, who is a consultant at Kamineni Wockhardt Hospital here, said an advanced method of treating asthma, bronchial thermoplasty, is under trial in Singapore, the UK and the US.

It would be available in India in two to three years.