The Italian severe/uncontrolled asthma registry (RItA): A 12-month clinical follow-up

Severe asthma: follow-up after one year from the Italian Registry on Severe Asthma (IRSA)

“…In addition, the closer follow-up of patients enrolled in any study or registry with the possibility of modifying and optimizing the treatment might help the management of asthma. These results are in line with the data from RItA (10), where the quite high frequency of persistence/worsening asthma after a 1-year follow-up (53.9%) was justified with the availability of just one anti-IgE biologic, compared to other studies/registries where anti-IL5(R) treatments were already authorized. In fact, RItA showed that, at baseline, patients with controlled asthma on omalizumab were about twice as numerous as those treated with ICS-LABA only, but in the absence of other biological agents (which were not available at the time of the study), this result remained stable over one year of follow-up.…”

“…These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the management of patients adhering to a registry in terms of interventions and treatments employed during the follow-up period in enhancing asthma control, as already reported by the literature (10). T2 phenotype -in particular high BEC and, to a lesser extent, total IgE -was a good predictor of control (OR 3.1 and 3.6 for T2_300 and T2_150, respectively), as well as nasal polyposis (OR 2.0).…”

“…In addition, the frequency of thermoplasty was also higher in patients not treated with biologics (3.9%). The more frequent use of maintenance OCS in patients not treated with biologics is confirmed by RItA (10). The significant improvement over the follow-up period was probably due to the increasing availability of biologics over the last years, also considering the high frequency of T2 phenotype in the registry, that is the current main target of these therapies.…”

“…Registries of SA appear to be a useful tool to evaluate the effectiveness of biologics and evaluate the presence and management of unmet needs of SA. Several European and International registries on SA have been designed with the purpose of achieving better understanding of its epidemiology, inflammatory profile, different phenotypes and treatment characteristics, and several data has been published so far (8)(9)(10)(11)(12). However, few longitudinal analyses were performed, focused only on specific aspects.…”

“…including switching (12.1%), which allowed to achieve a significant and stable improvement of the outcomes of therapy in 77.6% of patients. The follow-up of the Italian severe/uncontrolled asthma registry (RItA) (10) where the only biologic used was omalizumab showed that the implementation of a registry itself, in addition to the treatments, allow improvement in asthma control, after one year of follow-up. The third registry-based study evaluated the effectiveness of 36 months of treatment in 90 patients affected by severe eosinophilia asthma treated with biologics, confirming the high level (77.5%) of the effectiveness of biologic therapy, even though only 39 patients completed 3 years of follow-up (11).…”