Severe asthma in children

Severe asthma is rare. In childhood it affects less than 5%. Next generation treatment with biological preparations is also possible for children and makes sense for each individual. Biologic selection should be based on the asthma phenotype. It is possible that the use of biologics in severe atopic dermatitis could also prevent the later “atopic march” to asthma.

According to the KIGGS study, which has been collecting data on the health of children and adolescents in Germany since 2003, 8.6% of boys aged 11 to 13 years and 5.4% of girls in this age group suffer from asthma. The well-known boy-dominant behavior is increasingly weakened after puberty. If you take all atopic diseases (which, in addition to asthma, also include neurodermatitis and allergic rhinoconjunctivitis), you will find that their prevalence is about 30% in young people. Up to 50% of young people suffer from allergies. IgE antibody-mediated allergy is one of the most common diseases in children and adolescents.

Children with severe asthma remain a treatment challenge for pediatric pulmonologists. How common are these conditions in children? University-Prof. Dr. Zsolt Sepfalusi, Department of Pediatric Pulmonology, Allergy and Endocrinology at the Medical University of Vienna, estimates that less than 5% of childhood asthma patients actually suffer from severe asthma.

This is also confirmed by data from the Swedish BAMSE project: evaluation of a population-based cohort study with newborns from 1994 to 1996, who were allergically and immunologically observed over a period of 16 years, showed that by the age of 12 years, 329 out of 3015 children Those followed were asthmatic (= 11%), of whom 7 had severe asthma (= 2.1% of asthmatics or 0.23% of the population). The pediatrician said: “Severe asthma is rare, but it is more common than the rare diseases, which by definition occur when a maximum of one in 2,000 people are affected.”