The clinician's guide on monitoring children with asthma

Based on a review of the evidence on the usefulness of monitoring disease outcome parameters in childhood asthma and the author's 20-yr clinical experience in managing childhood asthma, this article provides the clinician with up-to-date recommendations on how to monitor childhood asthma in everyday clinical practice. Monitoring should be focused on patient-centered outcomes, such as exacerbations and impact on sports and play. Composite asthma control measures, although reasonably validated, do not take exacerbations into account and have a short recall window, limiting their usefulness as a routine monitoring tool in clinical practice. Lung function, airways hyperresponsiveness, exhaled nitric oxide, and inflammatory markers in sputum are surrogate end points, of little if any interest to patients. There is no evidence to support their use as a monitoring tool in clinical practice; office spirometry may be used as additional information. Rather than monitoring surrogate end points, clinicians should focus on showing a genuine interest in the impact of asthma on children's daily lives, and building and maintaining a partnership by monitoring those characteristics of asthma which have the biggest impact on children (exacerbations and limitations in sports and play), and adjusting treatment accordingly.