Holy Cow!

Not a Passage to India, nor a ticket to the abattoir for yet another useless umbrella label for airway disease like ACOS (watch this space!), but the BATMAN study. A short-odds favourite for the best study name of the decade award, BATMAN (see page 543, Editors' choice) tried to take the monitoring of paediatric asthma howling loudly into the 21st century by enrolling 280 children with asthma into one of 3 limbs: see every 4 months, ask how them how they were doing (Asthma control test); do the same thing monthly, but with a web-based tool; or add FeNO to the four monthly assessments. And the answer: asthma control days were the same in all 3 groups, although the web-based and FeNO groups were able to reduce their ICS dose over this impressive, year long study. Our editorialist, Louise Fleming (see page 517), draws the twin conclusions that it doesn't matter what you do so long as you do it lots of times, and you should use modern communication methods to do it, both profoundly depressing to your biomarker driven, old fogey editors …