Will My Child Outgrow Asthma ?
- Saturday, August 15, 2009, 7:26
- Asthma
- 927 views
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- Shelly:
- My question is, how likely is my child to outgrow his asthma?
- Rick:
- Tell us about your child. How old is he?
- Shelly:
- Right now he’s 9.
- Rick:
- And how severe is his condition?
- Shelly:
- Well, when he was first diagnosed he was in the hospital. It was quite a surprise. We had no idea.
- Dr. Redding:
- There are several points to be made from what you just said. We know of a lot of people in your circumstance where asthma is discovered because of a significant acute or sudden event, when you find your child in the hospital and you wonder what in the world’s happened, and people tell you you have a diagnosis of asthma in your child. I think in that situation you are still in good shape. Because you need to initiate therapy to see how much therapy is really required to control the asthma and then what therapy or less therapy is required to maintain the asthma. But children who have very severe disease usually do not outgrow their disease. In contrast to that, children who are fairly well controlled or who have mild, intermittent symptoms, are likely to get better over time. That doesn’t mean that you’ve lost the asthmatic predisposition for having symptoms if you hit the wrong trigger. But it does mean that with age, and particularly around the time of adolescence, your child has a chance of getting better.
- Dr. Stempel:
- I think the really important thing to look at is the other picture that we now have really good therapies for treating asthma. A decade ago, we really didn’t have as good an understanding of the illness, so we didn’t have as good therapy that we were proposing. I think today that with medication that people can live a very, very normal life with asthma and I think if you take the optimistic point of view, yeah it’s going to be around but I’ve got a good way of managing it and controlling it, I think that that’s something to look forward to.
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