It’s Time to Study Earlier Use of Biologics in Children With Asthma, Says Expert

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Leonard Bacharier, MD, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, explains how precision medicine and early intervention could help restore long-term quality of life, lung function, and reduce over-reliance on systemic corticosteroids in children with asthma.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

Hi, I am Dr. Leonard Bacharier. I’m a professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt in Nashville, Tennessee. And my entire practice is focused on children, largely with asthma. It’s become a really exciting time to care for children with asthma, a very common disorder in childhood, and one that really does impact the growth and development of children.

We’ve now been able to demonstrate that, like our adult colleagues, we have a wider range of very effective therapeutics that can help restore quality of life, lung function, and reduce children’s reliance and over-reliance on systemic corticosteroids and the long-term toxicities that they carry. I think we’re now in a position to really begin applying precision medicine to children and adults across the asthma spectrum from mild disease to severe disease — help us get the right agent to the right patient at the right time — and with these now advanced biologics, begin to study the effect of earlier initiation of these therapies on disease progression, potentially disease remission. And ideally to improve the lives of these patients in the long term, because we know that your lung function when you emerge from childhood is the trajectory you’ll be on for the remainder of your life. And we really need to be focused on optimizing that.

And really for the first time, I think we’re in a position to say that we can really do a fine job for our patients in that space. And I think it gives us a lot of hope that childhood asthma should not be a defining feature for most children with the disease, and that we can really make substantial quality of life improvements for them. So I look forward to the future to see how these treatments really do impact the disease long-term.

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