Many preschool children suffer from wheeze or chronic cough, but not all will develop asthma at school age. It is important to anticipate which children are more likely and which are less likely to develop asthma at school-age. This facilitates clinical decision making, allows comforting worried parents and enables researchers to include the right children into research studies.

Several tools for prediction of later asthma in symptomatic toddlers have been developed. However, some are difficult to use in clinical practice, while others tool have methodological limitations.

We therefore developed a new asthma prediction tool (Predicting Asthma Risk in Children, PARC), that uses only information that can easily be collected in primary care and is non-invasive (e.g. does not require blood tests). We developed PARC in a standardized way avoiding methodological limitations of previous instruments such as overfitting.

The new tool is designed for 1-3 year old children who had visited their doctor for wheeze or recurrent cough. It predicts the presence of asthma 5 years later. It consists of 10 items which sum up to a maximal score of 15.

Click here to get to our online version of the PARC.

Reference:

Pescatore AM, Dogaru CM, Duembgen L, Silverman M, Gaillard EA, Spycher BD, Kuehni CE. A simple asthma prediction tool for preschool children with wheeze or cough. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 2013; doi: 10.1016/j.jaci.2013.06.002.