 Hello, this is Dr. Guru Prasad, but I am an optical consultant in pulmonology in Manipala Hospital, Bangalore. I want to talk about Asthma, particularly on the World Asthma Day. Just to describe the disease, as you are all aware, Asthma is quite a common disease. It is a disease where people get symptoms of chest tightness, breathlessness, wheezing and they end up requiring a lot of medications. Some of them who are severe enough require hospitalizations. So, all of this can be treated and we can avoid hospitalizations, admissions and mutations can lead an entirely normal life with the good quality of life if they follow the adoptive advice. To summarize, the precipitating factors for these Asthma attacks can be things like environmental factors, viral infections, bacterial infections, which generally are more during environmental changes or seasonal changes and infections as well. Of course, household dust, pollution, grass pollen, tree pollen and of course the patient induced factors such as smoking can all precipitate Asthma attacks. Symptoms of Asthma are mainly breathlessness, wheezing and chest tightness. This may be accompanied by infection symptoms such as fever, cough, productive sputum. The main treatment for Asthma or rather the prevention of Asthma is using inhalers on a regular basis. Whenever there is an Asthma attack, the patients have to make sure they see their immunologist and take medicines accordingly. The patients may need additional medicines including antibiotics or increase in the dose of the inhalers. They will need tests such as breathing tests which is spirometry and tests such as X-rays and blood tests to look at infection, allergies and treatment accordingly. Treatment wise, as I said earlier, inhalers are the main line of treatment but when one becomes very unwell, they would need tablets or injections of other medications. Taking inhalers and medications regularly and seeing the doctors or immunologists regularly will help to prevent these hospitalization or attacks from happening. That would explain the treatment aspect. Coming to prevention of long-term management, apart from taking inhalers, patients with Asthma should also take flu and pneumonia vaccines to prevent these infections. They have to treat any associated diseases such as diabetes or heart disease which can contribute to these Asthma attacks. Finally, if I have to summarize the whole thing, people with Asthma should realize that it is completely controllable and treatable disease. The quality of life can be quite good and the patients can survive as good as any non-asthmatic person. However, this can only happen if inhalers are taken on a regular basis as advised by the doctors and appropriate measures are taken like vaccinations and regular visits to the outpatients to see the immunologist to make sure that the Asthma is under good control.