Asthma and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

Asthma is one of the four most common chronic disorders in adults, affecting 14 million adults in the United States and costing an estimated 7.9 billion dollars in medical care and 5.3 billion dollars in lost work or school. About 40% of asthmatics report using some form of complementary and alternative medicine approach to help reduce their asthma symptoms, but there is little evidence for their effectiveness. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is a group based program shown to reduce medical symptoms and improve quality of life for patients with many different chronic diseases. The goals of the proposed randomized controlled trial are to collect preliminary data on the effect of MBSR on quality of life, symptoms, and lung function in mild and moderate-severity asthmatics and to refine recruitment and data collection procedures for a future, larger clinical trial.