Description:

Asthma affects older adults to the same extent as children and adolescents. However, one is led to imagine that asthma prevalence decreases with aging and becomes a rare entity in the elderly. From a clinical perspective, this misconception has not trivial consequences in that, the recognition of the disease is delayed and the treatment postponed. The overall management of asthma in the elderly populations is also complicated by specific features that the disease develops in the most advanced ages and by the difficulties that the physician encounters when approaching the older asthmatic subjects. Asthma in older-age patients presents with specific clinical presentations and may encounter gaps and pitfalls in the diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. A multidisciplinary and multidimensional management of asthma in the elderly is, therefore, strongly advocated.