It is very difficult to predict the course of asthma in children.

Some children with asthma as a diagnosis by physician,do not have any problem after a few months.

Some children with asthma go on to wheeze for years together.

Some children have only mild symptoms although for a prolonged period of time.

Some children require repeated hospital admissions for treatment

Few children require ICU admission and others may require mechanical ventilation

There is very few longitudinal studies for the factors which can tell that, how severe the asthma will be in a particular child

To know that ,researchers from  National Taiwan University  Hospital studied on 699 children with diagnosis of asthma.The study was done between September 2004 to December 2018 on 2 cohorts.One cohort of 383 children with levels of serum allergen sensitization with blood eosinophil level and other cohorts of 313 children with blood eosinophil level only

Researchers wanted to know the longitudinal outcomes of asthma in children related to serum total IgE level,blood eosinophil level ,serum specific  allergen sensitization and dosages of inhalational steroids(ICS) used to control the asthma in children.

It was a retrospective study and data were collected for variability in Peak Expiratory flow(PEF),maximum predicted percentage of Peak expiratory flow,asthma severity and asthma control.

Study revealed that the severity of asthma was more in association with increased level of blood eosinophil (odds ratio [OR]: 1.043; 95% CI: 1.002–1.086; P =.0392) AND with sensitization to molds(OR: 2.2485; 95% CI: 1.3253–3.8150; P =.0027).

It was also seen over the time that, the allergen sensitization and dosage of Inhalational steroid used had the best area under receivers operator curve for asthma severity(0.5918),asthma control(0.6441),variability of PEF(0.6885) and percentage prediction of PEF(0.6609)

CONCLUSION:1.It was concluded from the study that the risk of adverse outcome was related to total serum IgE level,blood eosinophil level and  specific allergen sensitization

2. Long term outcome was related to allergen sensitization and dosages of ICS used to control asthma in children

REFERENCES;

Lee JH, Lin YT, Chu AL, et al. Predictive characteristics to discriminate the longitudinal outcomes of childhood asthma: a retrospective program-based study. Pediatr Res. Published online January 24, 2022. doi:10.1038/s41390-022-01956-6