Scientists at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center have created what they claim is the most accurate tool yet to predict asthma in young children.
Director of Asthma Research at Children's, Gurjit Khurana Hershey, M.D., Ph.D., explains that about 43 percent of kids with mild to moderate symptoms are missed because the previous gold standard test, the Asthma Predictive Index (API), only rates kids with a "yes" they are at risk or "no" they are not at risk answer.
Dr. Hershey and her colleagues created the Pediatric Asthma Risk Score (PARS), which gives kids a percentage of risk.
For this study, researchers used data from the Cincinnati Childhood Allergy and Air Pollution study. They also confirmed the results with children in Great Britain.
The PARS tool is available as an app on iTunes and Google Play, and includes new and less invasive criteria like demographic data and clinical factors routinely collected in a doctor's office.
"PARS is superior to the Asthma Predictive Index in its ability to predict asthma in children with mild to moderate asthma risk, with an 11 percent increase in sensitivity," says Hershey. "Children with mild to moderate risk may be the most likely asthma patients to respond favorably to prevention strategies."
The study is published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
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