Devulapalli et al’s paper1 attempts to answer the commonly encountered clinical question, “what is the risk of asthma in this wheezy infant?” While welcoming this attempt, we wish to put this into perspective and draw comparison with our similar work on the Isle of Wight Birth Cohort published 5 years ago.2

Findings that children with asthma at 10 years often had recurrent bronchial obstruction (RBO+ve) at 2 years are not new. We previously reported that recurrent chest infections at 2 years (causing airway obstruction and wheeze) increases the risk of asthma development at 10 years by …