New tests for diagnosing asthma in children
Clare Murray is a Professor and Consultant in respiratory paediatrics at Manchester University. She tells us about her research into making asthma easier to diagnose in children.
Why is it so difficult to diagnose asthma in children?
We don’t have a single gold standard test for asthma, which means asthma can be tricky to diagnose in adults and children. Usually, to make the diagnosis in adults, we get them to do tests which involve breathing in a certain way. The tests require you to breathe out forcefully for a long period of time, and children, especially little ones, can find that difficult to understand, which means we can’t get the accurate measurements we need to make a diagnosis. Therefore, using the same tests as we use on adults isn’t a great or reliable way to make a diagnosis in children.
Asthma is a highly variable disease
Many young children have asthma-like symptoms, like episodes of wheezing, but not all will go on to develop asthma. Sometimes their diagnosis is based purely on the symptoms they have but this can be very unreliable.
Often you can see a child in outpatients and they can be perfectly fine and healthy on that particular day, they do some breathing tests and the results don’t show signs of a positive diagnosis. This can lead to some children being misdiagnosed and means that some children who need treatment are not getting it.
New tests for diagnosing asthma in children
We’re looking at a number of tests to make diagnosing asthma in children easier. A lot of what we’re looking at is feasibility, so how easy it is for children to do the test and whether there’s an age limit. And of course, we want to see whether there are any differences between children we think have asthma and children we don’t think have asthma.
All of the tests collect data when the child is breathing normally; they don’t have to breathe in any special way. For example, we have one test called the Ventica which measures the child’s breathing overnight. It’s able to give us an idea of variability in that child’s breathing, and early studies show different variability between healthy children and children with wheezing.
One of the great things is that all the devices we are trialling are already available. This means if we show some success and show that it’s helpful, then these tests can be adopted right away, and we’ll be much closer to developing easy and accurate tests for asthma in children.
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