The significance of early recurrent wheeze for asthma outcomes in late childhood.

Recurrent early life wheeze is not always asthma, and up to 50% of children are reported to remit. With reports of adult asthma symptom relapse, we assessed the prognosis of recurrent bronchial obstruction (rBO) through adolescence in the Environment and Childhood Asthma (ECA) prospective birth cohort study. The present study is based on data from investigations at ages 2, 10 and 16 years of 550 young people (52% males) attending at 16 years of age. Based on the presence of rBO from 0-2 years, defined as recurrent (at least two episodes) doctor-diagnosed wheeze, and asthma from 2-10 years and 10-16 years, defined as at least two episodes of doctor-diagnosed asthma, symptoms and medication use, prognosis of rBO was assessed. Bronchial hyperresponsiveness (BHR) was diagnosed by a metacholine provocation dose ≤ 8 μmol that caused 20% reduction in the forced expiratory volume in 1 s. At 10-16 years, 34% of the 143 rBO children had asthma. All children with rBO had reduced lung function compared with the never asthmatics. Of the rBO children in remission, 48.4% had asthma symptoms, medication use and/or BHR compared with 26.7% with never asthma (p<0.001). Only 34.3% of rBO children were without asthma symptoms, medication use or BHR by 16 years, possibly indicating future asthma risk.