Childhood Cough verses Asthma

Featuring Dr. Keyvan Hadad, MD, MHSc, FRCPC

Duration: 1 minute, 46 seconds

Children who have post-infectious cough generally don’t require any major medical investigation or treatment.

This is quite different from the child who truly has a condition called asthma. Asthma by definition is a child who has recurrent wheezing spells; not just cough, but also the association with wheezing. And wheezing tends to be this classic sound of breathing in childhood best heard with a stethoscope by a physician, but which can also be heard by the mother or the father at home.

The child who wheezes the first time is not necessarily diagnosed with asthma. It is really the child who has recurrent episodes of wheezing, by definition three times or more, who then qualifies for a diagnosis of asthma.

Most children who have asthma also have had a condition called eczema, usually in the first year of life. They also often have the presence of a strong family history of asthma, eczema or hay fever.

For most children, the episodes of cough do resolve. But if the family feel that the child has coughed for too long – and coughed too long often means more than two weeks of coughing – or certainly if the child has these episodes of the wheezing, it is extremely important to visit the local family physician or the general pediatrician for further assessment of cough.

Presenter: Dr. Keyvan Hadad, Pediatrician, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Pediatrician