Moderate asthma: burden, mechanisms and therapeutic perspectives

Purpose of review: Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) document provides a classification of asthma severity according with the current level of treatment required to achieve diseases control and underlines the limitations of this approach. In this review, we will provide an overview of recent investigations that have analyzed clinical and molecular features of moderate asthma. Recent findings: Moderate asthma is heterogeneous in terms of response to inhaled treatment and pathogenetic mechanisms underlying the clinical features. Analysis of inflammatory pathways in patients who do not achieve disease remission allows identification of patient subgroups that may benefit from specific biological treatments. Summary: Scientific progress makes increasingly clear that there are biological mechanisms capable of identifying and justifying the degree of severity of asthma. The identification of these, combined with the development of new pharmacological treatments, will be the cornerstones of improving the management of asthma in its degrees of severity.