title: Recent developments in asthma education.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Asthma education is a key component of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) asthma guidelines. Although the benefits and importance of asthma patient education are well documented, there are still many open questions regarding how to best provide asthma education. The following review highlights recent developments in this topic.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Recent innovations have applied asthma education in a variety of settings. Ensuring that health professionals within a community provide consistent educational messages about asthma can create synergy and leverage limited healthcare resources to improve outcomes. In addition, children seem to have greater responsibility for self-management of asthma at younger ages.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Further work is needed to understand how clinicians can best educate and give parents anticipatory guidance about how to best teach and transfer asthma self-management skills to young children. By developing teaching and mastering self-management skills at an early age, children may be able to carry such skills into adulthood. Finally, given the prevalence of healthcare disparities, there is a continued need for rigorously evaluated programs that are culturally appropriate and effective.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA. michael.cabana@ucsf.edu
authors.forename: Michael D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Cabana
authors.forename: Janet M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Coffman
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D018927:Anti-Asthmatic Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use; D001249:Asthma / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000628:therapy*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D006801:Humans; D054555:National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (U.S.); D010353:Patient Education as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D012648:Self Care; D014481:United States
chemical_list: D018927:Anti-Asthmatic Agents