An index to predict asthma in wheezing young children produced promising initial results.

Abstract

Diagnosing asthma is difficult in infants and preschool children because wheezing is common in this age group and it is not synonymous with asthma. Some children outgrow the tendency to wheeze during colds in a few years’ time, whereas other develop asthma. Efforts have been made to find ways to identify the subgroup of preschool children with wheeze who are most likely to develop asthma (1,2). However, the different asthma predictive indexes mainly aim to predict children who will have a persistent wheeze or asthma, not necessarily the subgroup who will outgrow their symptoms. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.