TY - JOUR AU - Anirban Mandal AU - Puneet Sahi PY - 2017/07/16 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Is it Difficult to Treat Asthma in Children? JF - Journal of Medical Research and Innovation JA - J Med Res Innov VL - 1 IS - 3 SE - Review Article DO - 10.15419/jmri.77 UR - https://jmrionline.com/jmri/article/view/77 AB - Asthma, the commonest chronic lung disease in childhood, is managed effectively with inhaled medications in most of the cases. But a subset of pediatric asthma patients continues to experience substantial morbidity even after higher doses of medications; they are referred to as problematic severe asthma. In many such cases, the apparent resistance to therapy is actually due to a number of remediable factors. These cases are called ‘difficult to treat asthma’. The physician dealing with a child with problematic severe asthma needs to follow a systematic step- wise approach to find any possible underlying causes of poor response to therapy. The evaluation starts with revisiting the diagnosis of asthma and goes through a checking the prescription, patient compliance, assessment for co-morbidities, environmental triggers and psychological factors. Only in a very small number of cases where no such remediable factors are identified, a diagnosis of severe therapy-resistant asthma is made and the child should be referred to a pediatric pulmonologist for further evaluation and therapy. ER -