Breathing Training for Asthma

For this randomized controlled treatment study, the investigators plan to compare the effects of hypoventilation-based breathing training with a control intervention that will focus on breathing regularity and awareness. The two therapeutic procedures are closely matched on important variables such as duration and the nature of patient-therapist interaction, monitoring asthma related status and the medication intake, use of scientific equipment and monitoring devices to increase adherence, and initial plausibility. Asthma patients will be evaluated before, during, directly after, and at 1 month and 6 months after training. The primary goal of this training is to determine if a capnometry-assisted breathing training to raise end-tidal CO2 will produce more improvement in asthma control than a control training of breathing awareness. The second goal is to determine if capnometry-assisted breathing training for raising pCO2 will lead to higher pCO2 levels after training than before training on all three measures of pCO2 (the 2-hour monitoring, the standardized training sessions, and the homework assignments). The last objective is to determine if the clinical improvement in asthma outcomes for the raise-pCO2 breathing group will be greater in patients with more improvement in their pCO2.