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During the last decades, the prevalence of allergy has dramatically increased. Allergen-specific immunotherapy is the only currently available medical intervention that has the potential to affect the natural course of the disease, but there are still many questions and unmet needs hindering its widespread use to fulfill its treatment potential and maximize its benefits for the society. To provide a comprehensive phenome-wide overview in sublingual immunotherapy, using ragweed allergy as a target, we planned and carried out a longitudinal, prospective, observational, open-label study (DesensIT). In this paper we present challenges of using deep and comprehensive phenotypes embracing biological, clinical and patient-reported outcomes in allergen-specific immunotherapy and show how we designed the DesensIT project to optimize data collection, processing and evaluation.

The authors have summed up the survey results for children with asthma below 14 years of age participating in the Hunair II. surveillance program. This program proves the efficiency of montelucast 5mg treatment in cases of childhood asthma bronchiale. The 255 patients participating in the survey have received 5 mg montelucast therapy for 8 weeks. During the surveillance period they have used questionnaires to record the change of day and night symptoms, decrease of different restrictions and the quantity change of long- and short-acting beta agonists and inhaled steroids. The use of short-acting agonists decreased from 5 inhalations to 1 in 4 weeks. During the leukotriene antagonist montelucast treatment according to symptom scores 61% of the patients have experienced improvements after the 4th week, 80% after the 8th week. To sum up all the survey results--after the 8th week of treatment the daytime restrictions in the everyday lives of children with asthma have decreased by 88.1%, nighttime restrictions by 80.1%. After the 2nd month of the HUNAIR II. surveillance program it could be deduced that montelucast 5 mg therapy used in child populations less then 14 years of age with asthma has proven useful.