If doctors want to help children suffering from asthma, they should spend some time offering encouragement to their parents, researchers say.
A new study finds that the higher the parents' expectations for controlling the asthma, the better their children do. Those with lower expectations tend not to be aggressive enough in managing the illness.
The study appears in the October issue of Pediatrics. The lead author is Dr. Lauren Smith, now with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
For the study, researchers surveyed the families of more than 750 asthmatic children and asked them about their symptoms in the two previous weeks. For more than 35 percent of the children, the condition was found to be insufficiently controlled.
The parents were also asked about medication use and about their beliefs about asthma, including whether they thought the children could be free of symptoms most of the time and not miss school.
The senior author of the study, Dr. Tracy A. Lieu of Harvard Medical School, said many parents made the mistake of looking at asthma as an intermittent disease, not a chronic one. That means they respond only when their child is having a serious problem, instead of looking for warning signs and using medicine preventively.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/health/research/14chil.html
