LAUSR

Porsbjerg and Menzies-Gow reviewed the clinical impact of co-morbidities on severe asthma management. The European Respiratory Society/American Thoracic Society (ERS/ATS) guidelines on severe asthma and the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) document recommend a systematic assessment of potential co-morbidities in all patients with possible severe asthma. Co-morbidities may significantly affect asthma control, both aggravating and mimicking symptoms. Thus, recognition of a co-morbidity is a crucial step in the workup of severe asthma. Gastric reflux (GR) is quite common in asthmatic patients, mainly in patients with severe asthma. Although this issue has been recently investigated Porsbjerg and Menzies-Gow, some pathophysiological aspects remain obscure. We now present our retrospectively conducted clinical study of 188 (107 females) consecutive outpatients with asthma. The aim was to evaluate the impact of some demographic and clinical variables (body mass index (BMI), past smoking, GINA asthma control grade, sinonasal co-morbidity, respiratory symptoms in the current month, early onset of asthma, symptom perception assessed by visual