Abstract

Introduction - Asthma is characterized by an inflammation in airways, which, when uncontrolled, can place severe limits on daily life and is sometimes fatal. This chronic disease appears to be increasing more in younger than in older children, since 48.7% of hospital admittances with asthma were patients aged less than 19 years old. Knowing the percentage of controlled children is essential to understand the need to inform and help people to control the disease.

Aims – This systematic review aims to understand what the proportion of asthma control is, in European children.

Methods – The study design of our article is that of a systematic review based on observational studies performed on asthmatic European children (aged between 0 and 18 years old). Through a query we intend to search and select articles, basing on exclusion and inclusion criteria, in order to obtain a number of studies containing quality information on proportion values.

Results – We didn't expect to find great differences between proportion values in European countries. However, after analyzing 6 articles we found that not only the values were different among countries, but also referring to the same country the results were contradictory. Regarding Spain, 15% of children show controlled asthma against proportion values of 70% when it comes to a separate study. The two Dutch articles reflect a similar pattern about 70% in one and less than 10% in the other. On the study reporting Germany and Switzerland together, around half of the participants included in the study are uncontrolled, when in Hungary, 70% are controlled.

Conclusion -    After analysing the results of the different European countries, the main conclusion we can extract is that control of asthmatic children is very distinct among them.