Real-life studies and registries of severe asthma: The advent of digital technology.

Severe asthma is a chronic and heterogeneous disease that negatively affects the quality of life of our patients and health care utilization. Given the remaining burden of uncontrolled disease in many of these patients, better understanding of its epidemiology, disease mechanisms, effectiveness of novel therapies such as biologics are still highly needed. Asthma treatment guidelines are largely informed by randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and meta analyses of RCTs, however inclusion criteria of many efficacy RCTs of asthma treatments often exclude a high number of patients with asthma in the community. Data from real-life studies and registries of severe asthma can complement efficacy studies by not only providing evidence on how a treatment performs in everyday clinical practice, post marketing safety information, data to support subsequent clinical trial design, but also helping to delineate the natural history of a disease and supporting important translational research endeavors. In the current review, we summarise available national and international collaborative studies and registries, the variables studies and the novel data and insights they provide. The key source of information for most asthma registries are real-life data from patient's electronic health records. Advent of digital technology in collecting data and their analysis is obvious and we draw attention to generation of new knowledge from registries of severe asthma to improve current diagnostic and therapeutic guidelines and asthma control.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. VU: She received consulting fees, honoraria for educational events and support for attending meetings from AstraZeneca, ALK Slovakia, Takeda, BerliChemie-Menarini, Sanofi Genzyme, Novartis, Mundipharma, AstraZeneca, Chiesi, S&D Pharma, KRKA, LR: She received grants and contracts from Sanofi Global, Gene Dx(formerly Sema 4), consulting fees from Sanofi US, AstraZeneca, she received honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing and other educational events and support for attending meetings from American College of Chest Physicians and CHEST Foundation, she served as Editorial board/Associate Editor Respiratory Medicine, MJ: He received honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing and other educational events and for serving as advisor or consultant for Novartis, BerlinChemie-Menarini, SANOFI Genzyme, AstraZeneca, ALK Slovakia, GSK, Takeda, Mundipharma, Pfizer, he received support for attending meetings from Takeda and ALK Slovakia, he served as president of Slovak Society of Allergology and Clinical Immunology and Associate editor Respiratory medicine, SS: His institution received research grants support of his behalf or contracts from Sanofi, Novartis, GSK, he received payment or honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing or educational events from Teva Pharmaceutical, he served as Guest editor SI asthma innovations Respiratory Medicine, he served as employee of Hippo Dx, Galenus Health.
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