International European Respiratory Society/American Thoracic Society guidelines on severe asthma

From the authors: We thank J. Bousquet and colleagues for their concerns regarding exclusion of “untreated asthma” as a form of severe asthma, with respect to the recently published international European Respiratory Society (ERS)/American Thoracic Society (ATS) guidelines on severe asthma [1]. We do recognise this category of untreated asthma and agree that untreated asthma may result in serious exacerbations of disease and death, an issue that is not confined to developing countries alone. Indeed, everywhere in the world, untreated asthma can result from lack of access to medical care but can also result not only from nonadherence to therapy or of inadequately treated asthma. As emphasised in the ERS/ATS guideline definitions, these issues …