Respiratory Medication Adherence: Toward a Common Language and a Shared Vision

The World Health Organization highlights the importance of optimizing chronic respiratory disease (CRD) medication adherence with a view to improving clinical outcomes and alleviating ever-increasing pressures on the world's health care resources.1 and 2 The Global Initiative for Asthma also advocates for optimized adherence, recommending that asthma symptoms and risk be optimized on the lowest dose of therapy appropriate and that high-cost add-on therapies only be considered in patients with severe disease who have persistent symptoms and/or exacerbations despite optimized treatment with high-dose controller medications and treatment of modifiable risk factors.2 This requirement for optimized therapy as a prerequisite to asthma treatment escalations is of increasing relevance as evermore high-cost biological therapies with narrow therapeutic margins are expected to be licensed for CRD. Use of such novel therapies must be targeted at patients with true unmet need to maximize their cost-effectiveness.