What to Know About Severe Asthma in Kids

Asthma isn’t always a quick and easy diagnosis in children. According to a 2014 task force assembled by the American Thoracic Society and the European Respiratory Society, pediatric severe asthma can be diagnosed if a child’s symptoms require treatment with high-dose inhaled corticosteroids plus a second “controller” medication for a full year, and/or systemic corticosteroids for half a year or longer. In other words, its diagnostic criteria are based on the intractability of its symptoms. “It’s definitely a limitation when you’re defining a disease state based on how much medicine is needed to control it, but part of that is because asthma is such a heterogenous disease,” says Dr. Jonathan Gaffin, co-director of the severe asthma program at Boston Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In some children with severe asthma, the condition causes daily breathing problems but few outsize exacerbations. In others, this trend is reversed; extended periods of symptom-free living are broken up by infrequent but serious flares. In fact, a young person’s lung function may appear normal and healthy in between exacerbations, which experts say is one difference between severe asthma in children as opposed to severe asthma in adults. Severe asthma has another defining trait: it tends to show up very early in life. “By the time they ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Disease healthscienceclimate Source Type: news