Allergen-specific immunotherapy for bronchial asthma

With more than 300 million affected patients, bronchial asthma is one of the most common chronic inflammatory diseases worldwide and leads to a significant reduction in the quality of life. Allergies, one common cause of this disease, have become increasingly important over the past half century and affect up to 30% of the population today. While allergen-specific immunotherapy (SIT) is a standard care in the treatment of patients with allergic rhinitis, it is still controversially discussed in the treatment of patients suffering from allergic asthma. The use of SIT is the only treatment option available to counteract allergies and, thus, the main cause of the asthma epidemic. In contrast to the symptomatically effective therapeutic agents, a sustained improvement of symptoms over many years has been demonstrated for SIT; however, only 10% of affected patients worldwide have access to this type of therapy. One reason might be that the risk of severe side effects during the 3–5 years of therapy is considered to be too high. Triggered by worldwide standardization efforts that led to the Therapy Allergen Regulations (TAV) in Germany, effective and safe subcutaneous (SCIT) and sublingual (SLIT) therapeutic agents are available. Many new dosage regimens and administration forms, such as epicutaneous or intralymphatic immunotherapy, are under development. © 2018, Springer Medizin Verlag GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature.