Understanding of wheeze crucial to investigation of asthma

A new study has found that parents may not know what constitutes a ‘wheeze’, an ignorance that may be leading to an undertreating of asthma. In the study, researchers investigated the understanding of the term ‘wheeze’ in medical questionnaires. Parents of a random population sample of 4,236 children aged 6 to 10 years were asked if their child had wheezed during the past year, and what they understood by this word. {openx:269} In total, 13 per cent of the parents said that their child had recently suffered from wheeze. However, only 83 per cent of the respondents described wheeze correctly…