PrecISE, or the Precision Interventions for Severe and/or Exacerbation-Prone Asthma Network, is a network of medical centers, doctors, and scientists. We are looking for better ways to treat adolescents and adults with severe asthma.
What is Severe Asthma?
Asthma is a long-lasting disease. It affects the airways that carry air in and out of the lungs. The airways can react to such things as dust, pollen, chemicals, or bacteria. Some symptoms of asthma are wheezing, coughing, chest tightness, and trouble breathing. Most people with asthma can control their symptoms with medicine, though three in five people with asthma limit their physical activity to prevent asthma flare ups.
About 10-15% of people with asthma have severe asthma. There are different types of severe asthma. Medicines for asthma that are available right now often don’t work well for people with severe asthma. This disease can make their lives very difficult.
While asthma can start early or later in life, asthma is the most common chronic childhood disease according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Frequent visits to the doctor’s office and to the ER can create a lot of stress on the entire family. Severe asthma in young people may get worse over time and often does not respond well to available treatments.
What is PrecISE?
The Precision Interventions for Severe and/or Exacerbation-Prone Asthma Network (PrecISE) is a clinical study sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). PrecISE's physician scientists are dedicated to researching better treatments for people living with severe asthma.
PrecISE is a clinical study that uses precision medicine for severe asthma. Precision medicine is an approach to the prevention and treatment of disease that uses information about an individual's or group's specific disease process, symptoms, and treatment responses, to identify the medicines and therapies that are most likely to be effective for them.
Researchers from over 30 locations across the US are involved in PrecISE.
PrecISE has now completed enrollment. We thank all of our participants!
How PrecISE is Different from Other Severe Asthma Studies
Many studies look only at the patient’s symptoms or lung function for choosing a medicine. But people with severe asthma can be very different from each other. They may have the same symptoms, but different things can be happening in their bodies that cause the same symptoms. This means that the same medicine might not work the same way in different people, even if they have the same symptoms. This is one reason that severe asthma is so hard to treat.
PrecISE has two goals:
- Research how to more easily identify some of the types of severe asthma.
- Research treatments for the types of severe asthma being studied in PrecISE.
Photo of two PrecISE Participant Advisory Council (PAC) members.