Do all children who wheeze a lot have asthma?

  As a chronic inflammatory disease of the respiratory tract, childhood asthma often seriously affects the normal life and learning of the affected children, leading to growth and developmental disorders and even psychological disorders, and the incidence is increasing year by year. Asthma has become a public health issue of concern.  Since the beginning of winter, the pediatric wards of the city’s maternal and child health hospitals have been crowded with coughing and wheezing children, mostly little brats under the age of 2. So are all these wheezing children bronchial asthma? Of course not! Our 2008 guidelines for the diagnosis and prevention of bronchial asthma in children point out that there are three types of wheezing in children younger than five years old: early transient wheezing; persistent wheezing with early onset; and late onset wheezing.  Early-onset transient wheezing is most often seen in children born prematurely and whose parents smoke, mainly due to poor lung development, and most of these wheezing symptoms gradually disappear after the age of three. The last type of wheezing is delayed wheezing, which has a typical atopic background, such as a history of infantile eczema and a parent’s history of asthma, etc. This type of child is the one with asthma, and if not treated regularly, asthma symptoms will continue into adulthood.  Many parents think that it is okay for their children to wheeze and that they will get better when they grow up, but in fact, these children are early transient wheezing or early onset persistent wheezing, not real asthma, which will not heal on its own without intervention.