Tuesday, December 02, 2008

All that wheezes is not asthma

About a third of patients who carried a diagnosis of asthma turned out not to have asthma at all in this study. A related editorial makes the point that underdiagnosis as well as overdiagnosis of asthma is common, and the major error is failure to do spirometry.

I wish the paper had provided the real diagnoses of the patients who didn’t have asthma. An interview with one of the authors suggests that many of these patients had an acute viral illness with bronchospasm, were declared to have asthma and never formally tested or tapered off their medications.

1 comment:

sharmila said...

can u plz tell who is the person who quoted all wheezes r not asthma?