Health care providers frequently are asked to advise patients with asthma about the circumstances in which they can work or pursue high-risk activities. Several national organizations have developed guidelines to aid the practitioner in addressing this task. The most widely disseminated policy statement, the Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Management of Asthma developed by the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (NAEPP) (1, 2), focuses mainly on nonoccupational risk factors. Although a special section gives additional brief guidance on the management of occupational asthma, issues concerning what activities patients with asthma should avoid or undertake with extreme caution are not addressed. In addition to the NAEPP guidelines, there are several other consensus or policy statements on the management of asthma in various settings (3-6). Most of these focus on the pharmacologic management of asthma, either in preventing exacerbation or in rescue management. The American College of Chest Physicians (3) consensus statement takes the most comprehensive approach to workplace asthma, focusing on diagnosis and management of the sick worker, rather than preventing exacerbations in someone with preexisting asthma. Health providers need more detailed guidelines to counsel and advise individuals with asthma on how to live their lives fully, while minimizing their risk for significant illness. The specific goals of this statement are to review public health, ethical, legal, policy, and behavioral issues that impact on asthma management; develop a consensus approach to evaluating a patient with asthma considering employment in a specific workplace; outline the medical, behavioral, workplace, and management is-Members of the ad hoc statement committee have disclosed any direct commercial associations (financial relationships or legal obligations) related to the preparation of this statement. This information is kept on file at the ATS headquarters.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.