Here’s the good news: no matter what your experience, you can control your asthma. New drugs, better treatment guidelines, and ongoing medical research are changing the way doctors and their patients fight asthma. You, as a person with asthma, benefit.

In 1996, for example, the first entirely new class of asthma drugs in over 20 years began reaching pharmacy shelves. Called leukotriene antagonists, these oral medications ease asthma’s inflammatory effects on a daily basis. In doing so, they help prevent asthma attacks and limit the long-term damage chronic asthma might do to your lungs.

A year later, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a government agency that funds and conducts medical research, released new treatment guidelines to help doctors better diagnose and manage asthma in all its varieties. Today, NHLBI urges health care providers to fight asthma more aggressively than in years past. That means diagnosing asthma in its early stages, trying powerful combinations of drugs, and carefully monitoring your progress as a patient. To manage asthma effectively, NHLBI suggests doctors and people with asthma follow four basic steps:

- Form a partnership with your doctor to explore and understand your asthma. What causes it? How severe is it? How does it respond to changes in your lifestyle, diet, and medication? Questions like these are best answered when you and your doctor work together.

-Control your environment to avoid asthma triggers.

- Find the right medications to stop your asthma attacks and treat your asthma on a daily basis.

- Use certain devices, like a peak-flow meter, to measure your breathing. It’s difficult to assess your lung function based on just how you feel. Certain tests, however, can pick up changes in your breathing patterns before an asthma attack strikes.

From a research standpoint, our view of asthma is changing, too. In the past decade, scientists have begun to better understand and appreciate how asthma causes chronic lung inflammation, not just occasional attacks. At universities and drug companies across the country, researchers are studying the cells that cause your lungs to stay swollen and overreact Some scientists are even hunting for genes that contribute to asthma. At the same time, researchers continue investigating the series of chemical reactions in the lungs that lead to an asthma attack. These efforts will lead to all-new asthma drugs in the future.

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