Management of status asthmaticus.

Mortality Status asthmaticus is a term which is universally used but not uniformly defined. It is generally taken to mean an acute episode of 'bronchospasm', severe enough to cause distress to the patient and which is not relieved by conventional 'bronchodilator' therapy. Is status asthmaticus a transient event in the life of the asthmatic patient; can it be treated as a minor incident? I think the following data will convince you that nothing is farther from the truth. It consists of the deaths in the Cardiff area for the years 1951 to 1964 and I am grateful to Dr D. A. Williams for generously making it available to me. There were 111 deaths over this period (Fig. 1), an average of