An analysis of fifteen childhood asthma fatalities

There is evidence from pediatric tertiary care centers in the United States that childhood deaths from asthma in hospitalized patients are becoming increasingly rare, while asthma mortality outside the hospital appears to be on the rise. When a young outpatient with asthma dies, the event is apt to be sudden and unanticipated and the victim is likely to be a preadolescent or adolescent who has suffered from asthma most of his or her life and who, despite ongoing bronchodilator therapy, requires hospitalizations for treatment of status asthmaticus. Patients in this age cohort have a strong tendency to underuse, overuse, or neglect to use prescribed medications, possibly as a gesture of emerging independence or because of the depression engendered by a chronic illness. In some instances serious psychosocial pathology accounts for noncompliance. For a patient with chronic asthma with a high-risk profile, any departure from an ongoing treatment regimen may result in respiratory failure. Pathologic complications of asthma may also act to upset the precarious physiologic equilibrium these patients have established. Unsuspected chronic pneumonia may lead to further increases in a chronically high degree of oxygen desaturation. Hypoxic seizures during an asthma attack may precipitate pulmonary edema. Tension pneumothorax has an even greater fatality potential for high-risk patients with asthma than it has for other patients with asthma, and pulmonary hypertension with cor pulmonale may develop because of chronic hypoxia. Some sudden deaths in children with chronic, severe asthma are unassociated with any of the above, making it necessary to entertain still other hypotheses.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)