Is respiratory viral infection really an important trigger of asthma exacerbations in children?

Lee, So-lun; Chiu, Shui-seng Susan; Malik, Peiris Joseph S.; Chan, Kwok-hung; Wong, Hing-sang Wilfred; Lau, Yu-lung

One other possibility is that all of our participants had better control of asthma symptoms that was reflected in the lower overall number of episodes of unscheduled sick visits per person time year compared to the Southampton cohort. We speculated that the use of regular inhaled steroids might also have some effect. While most clinical or experimental studies failed to document the efficacy of inhaled steroids in preventing intermittent virus-induced asthma exacerbations [9, 10] , the aforementioned Canadian case-control study [5] showed that children attending emergency department for asthma exacerbations were more likely to have respiratory viruses isolated but less likely to have prescription of anti-inflammatory medications.