: Study: New symptom-based screening technique for detecting asthma risk in children #IndiaNEWS #Health Hamilton: A team of researchers affiliated with the CHILD Cohort Study (CHILD) has created a simple

Study: New symptom-based screening technique for detecting asthma risk in children #IndiaNEWS #Health
Hamilton: A team of researchers affiliated with the CHILD Cohort Study (CHILD) has created a simple new symptom-based screening technique for detecting asthma risk in children as early as two years old.
The efficacy of the toolthe CHILDhood Asthma Risk Tool, or CHARTis detailed in a study published in the highly influential Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Asthma affects nearly 330 million people worldwide, carries a heavy healthcare cost, and is the leading cause of hospitalization among kids in Canadaespecially kids under five, comments co-senior author Dr. Padmaja Subbarao, who is a respirologist and CRC Tier 1 Chair in Pediatric Asthma and Lung health at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the Director of CHILD. She also a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Toronto and an Adjunct Professor in Respirology and Medicine at McMaster University.
Earlier detection of this condition will allow doctors to treat kids sooner, so they will suffer less and avoid going to the hospital, thus also lowering costs to the healthcare system. One reason asthma often goes undetected in young children is because most conventional asthma tests are difficult to perform in children, time consuming and invasive, involving skin pricks and blood-taking, so many patients and doctors choose to avoid them, notes the studys co-first author, Myrtha E Reyna-Vargas, who is an M. Sc. and a biostatistician at SickKids. Other conventional tests can also require appointments with specialists and the use of specialized equipment to test lung function, with associated costs. CHART categorizes childrens risk of future asthma and persistent symptoms as High, Moderate or Low, based on information reported before age three. The tool recommends follow-up actions for each group.
The beauty of CHART, the new tool we have developed, is that it can be used by family doctors or nurses in a low-resource primary care setting. It is non-invasive; it can be done on-the-spot and in-the-moment; it is cost free and it requires no special equipment. Now that we have shown CHARTs benefits in the CHILD study, we are working towards validating its use prospectively in clinical practice. In the study, CHART was applied to data from 2,354 children participating in CHILD, a longitudinal research study launched in 2008 that has been following the physical, social and cognitive development of nearly 3,500 Canadian children from before birth.
From information about the childrens wheezing and coughing episodes, use of asthma medications, and related hospital visits at three years of age, CHART was able to predict with 91% accuracy which of these kids would have persistent wheezea key indicator of asthmaby age five.

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