EDITORIAL
Childhood asthma
The childhood asthma epidemic
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor G Russell
Department of Child Health, University of Aberdeen, Royal Aberdeen Children’s Hospital, Aberdeen AB25 2ZG, UK; libra@ifb.co.uk
A case of delayed rather than mistaken diagnosis
Keywords: asthma; children; epidemiology; wheeze
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Although asthma has been recognised for millennia,1,2 early writers made no attempt to estimate its prevalence. Salter3 declared that asthma "cannot, in this country, be said to be by any means rare, and I believe that all who direct their attention to it will find it to be much commoner than is imagined". He did not, however, venture any estimate of its prevalence, and it was another 60 years before epidemiological studies began to appear.4
These early studies were bedevilled by the lack of an agreed definition of asthma, reluctance to diagnose a chronic untreatable condition that in the Oslerian tradition was widely regarded as psychoneurotic,5 and failure to appreciate that upper respiratory tract infection was a major trigger of asthma attacks, so that wheeze triggered by infection was usually diagnosed as bronchitis. Thus, when Collins6 described morbidity patterns in 9000 American families in 1935, he reported that,
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