Recent advances in bronchial thermoplasty for severe asthma: a narrative review

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Severe asthma refers to asthma that requires step 4 or 5 therapy recommended by Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) to prevent it from becoming uncontrolled or remaining “uncontrolled” despite this therapy. The poor treatment effect of severe asthma has been perplexing clinicians, which reduces the quality of life (QoL) of patients with asthma, and increases the mortality of such patients, so improving the therapeutic effect of severe asthma is an urgent problem to be solved in the clinic. Bronchial thermoplasty (BT) is a new non-drug therapy for severe asthma that is difficult to control with medications. It has been approved for clinical practice in China and the United States. The article aims at providing a new treatment option for patients with severe asthma that is poorly controlled by medications, thus improving the QoL in these patients. METHODS: An extensive literature search was performed in the PubMed database, with “bronchial thermoplasty” as the key term. The full texts of all potentially relevant articles were obtained, and relevant information was extracted. KEY CONTENT AND FINDINGS: We find that BT is suitable for patients with severe asthma poorly controlled by medications. CONCLUSIONS: This paper reviews the mechanism of action, procedure, safety and effectiveness, adverse effects and complications, problems, and prospects of BT, with an attempt to guide the practical application of this technique.