Doctors grade asthma screening in schools

Physicians disagree about whether the focus should be on diagnosis or treatment.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Aug. 18, 2003.

School-based asthma screening tests for children are giving allergy experts hope that the problem of underdiagnosis can be addressed.

Studies published recently in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology suggest that questionnaires conducted through schools might effectively screen for asthma and allergies in children. The tools don't actually diagnose the conditions but are designed to identify children who need follow-up.

"Schoolchildren are screened for vision problems, hearing disorders and scoliosis. There's every reason to include allergies and asthma among the screenings," said Robert M. Miles, MD, past president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. "The earlier allergic asthma is recognized and treated in children, the better the outcome."

Several screening tests exist, and many physicians see a need for a useful school-based screen to lower high rates of school absenteeism and sleep disturbances caused by undiagnosed allergies and asthma.

"When working with the schools to determine their biggest problems with asthma and allergies, what we got consistently was they didn't know how many sufferers they had," said Raoul Wolf, MD, lead author of one of the papers and professor of pediatrics and chief of the section of allergy and immunology at the University of Chicago. "From that, we thought that it might be a good idea to develop a tool that would be easy to use."