Role of aspergillus sensitization on disease severity in patients with bronchial asthma and its consequences on its prevalence

Identification of Aspergillus sensitization in patients with bronchial asthma and its clinical significance. So this study is planned to find out the prevalence of Aspergillus sensitization in patients with bronchial asthma and to evaluate the impact of Aspergillus sensitization on disease severity.
This is a perspective cross-sectional study conducted between Sept 2016 to Sept 2017 in the Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Career Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow. The study was approved by the institutional ethics committee and written consent was taken from all patients who were enrolled in the study. This cross-sectional observational study was aimed at studying the basic differences in disease characteristics and the severity of bronchial asthma between aspergillus sensitive patients and aspergillus non-sensitive patients. The ancillary findings include Prevalence of Aspergillus sensitization, Proportion of patients with Aspergillus. The prevalence of Aspergillus sensitization was estimated previously by several studies. It was found to be a minimum of 33%, 28%, 35.1%. The various factors responsible for the varied prevalence of Aspergillus sensitization were differences in environment and exposure to allergens, differences in methods of diagnosing fungal sensitization. In our study, both skin prick test and specific IgE were used for diagnosing the fungal sensitization which reduces the discordance of results between the two.