History Of Serious Asthma Exacerbations Should Be Included In Guidelines Of Asthma Severity

Dr. Monica Federico, Pediatric Pulmonologist at The Children’s Hospital, and her associates have published an article titled, "History Of Serious Asthma Exacerbations Should Be Included In Guidelines Of Asthma Severity." The article will appear in the January 2007 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Dr. Federico and her team studied the correlation between guideline-based severity categories and objective markers of disease activity such as pulmonary function tests and bronchial hyper-reactivity. The analysis compared the history of a serious asthma exacerbation to Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA)-based asthma severity guidelines. The authors found that the history of a serious asthma exacerbation is significantly associated with bronchial hyper-reactivity, pulmonary function, and current disease activity and should be included in guidelines for asthma severity assessment and therapy.

This study evaluated how well the history of a serious asthma exacerbation and GINA-based asthma severity categories predict asthma disease activity. Adding the history of a serious asthma exacerbation to the criteria in consensus guidelines for asthma severity should improve the ability of these clinical tools to predict current disease activity and future clinical course.

CHILD Magazine has ranked Children's pediatric pulmonary medicine department as the sixth best program in the country. The honor was bestowed earlier this month and the program was the only one in the Rocky Mountain region to earn a ranking.