Integrating Weight Management Into Comprehensive Asthma Care

ReachMD Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Anne Dixon, who’s a pulmonologist, professor, and the E. L. Amidon Chair of the Department of Medicine at The University of Vermont Robert Larner, M.D. School of Medicine. She’ll be sharing best practices for treating patients with obesity and asthma.

Here’s Dr. Dixon now.

Dr.Dixon:
What do you really need to remember when you're going to see a patient with obesity and asthma? Well, check the BMI every time you see a patient with obesity and asthma, and think, is obesity a problem here? And understand that the connection between asthma and obesity is real, and actually, it's super complicated. It can really change the nature of asthma.

Understand that people with obesity suffer with stigma. There's stigma associated with obesity, and many of them have tried to lose weight on multiple occasions in the past. So, I think it's really important for us to approach the patient with empathy and understanding, and I think that's something many of us trained to take care of patients with asthma, particularly in subspecialty care, are not used to.

We have an increasing number of studies that suggest that you don't have to lose a huge amount of weight to improve your asthma control. Work from our own group and others suggest that losing about five to 10 percent of your weight, if you're suffering with obesity, is enough to improve asthma control.

And I think this is really important. So, if you have a patient who's 400 pounds, in their own head, they're thinking, “I need to lose 200 pounds.” No one's going to lose 200 pounds, but if they can lose about five percent of their weight, if they can lose 20 pounds, they're likely to experience significant improvements in asthma control.

I think that's a much more manageable concept for people than trying to get down to a lean BMI. So, approach patients with empathy. Understand that there's a complicated relationship here, but understand that certainly, if they can lose five to 10 percent of their weight, they're likely to experience significant improvements in asthma control.

ReachMD Announcer:
That was Dr. Anne Dixon discussing how we can better care for patients with obesity and asthma. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!