Why Is It Complicated To Diagnose Children With Asthma

It is always a very complicated task to diagnose someone with asthma but diagnosing a baby is much more difficult than an adult. Most of the doctors almost never diagnose asthma in babies under 2 years of age because they can't do any scientifically proven tests which could confirm this diagnosis. Only some advanced medical institutions carry out that kind of tests but most of them still have experimental status.

The methods of diagnosing your child will be different depending on how old he is. If your child is still an infant then prepare yourself for a lot of questions about his and your medical history as well as his symptoms but if your kid is more than 4 years old then it is easier to make a more precise diagnosis by the help of different tests.

There are some asthma specialists who can try to diagnose babies with asthma even if they are under 1 years of age. Even though an infant is not able to tell us about how he feels, most of the usual symptoms are clearly noticeable such as wheezing and coughing, however, there are a few problems:

Babies have small and weak airways, so they often suffer from respiratory illnesses which have very similar symptoms to asthma;
The symptoms are not the same in all asthma cases - you can even have this disease without wheezing which is usually considered as the most common sign of asthma and also you can experience wheezing without having asthma.

In short, besides the lack of testing methods, there are a lot of other factors which make this whole thing more complicated, so that is the reason why you should trust the task of diagnosing your baby to a doctor who specializes in childhood chest problems. By taking a look at the symptoms, doing physical examination and analyzing family's medical history the specialist should be able to make a precise diagnosis. In some cases it may not be possible but you have to accept that and make sure you do everything to cure your baby's health problems regardless if he has asthma or some other respiratory disease.

The usual methods that are used for diagnosing asthma are peak flow and respiratory tests but, unfortunately, it is almost impossible to successfully undergo these tests for children younger than 4 years of age. As your child grows older he will be able to take more precise lung function tests which can confirm if the earlier diagnosis was correct, so diagnosing asthma in pre-school children is much easier than in infants. If your child is already around 6 years old then you shouldn't worry about a possible inaccurate diagnosis anymore.

Miks is a 22 year old student and he loves writing articles about different health topics. You can take a look at his latest article about asthma in babies if you are interested in finding out more about the usual symptoms, triggers and treatment options. Providing quality reviews, articles and writings on asthma online.