Advances in adult asthma diagnosis and treatment and health outcomes, education, delivery, and quality in 2011: What goes around comes around

Last year’s review of research advances in adults with asthma emphasized the linear trajectory of translation: the initial studies translating bench findings to the first patients (T1) are connected to larger efficacy studies, including clinical trials studying subjects under tightly controlled conditions (T2), and these in turn are connected to research, including comparative effectiveness research, that tests how the efficacy findings of T2 research fare in the real world, diverse populations, and varied practice settings (T3). This year what was observed was a more interwoven relationship (rather than a linear one), in which each translational level informs the others and new approaches to answering old questions have led to new discoveries. Within this framework, the present review summarizes clinical research on asthma in adults that was reported in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 2011, with emphasis on health outcomes, education, delivery, and quality in terms of discoveries related to mechanisms of disease, environmental exposures, and management.