According to The Huffington Post UK, medical experts warn that children are being wrongly diagnosed with asthma and inhalers are being given out “like fashion accessories.”
Professor Andrew Bush, a consultant pediatric chest physician at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, and Dr Louise Fleming, a clinical senior lecturer in respiratory paediatrics at Imperial College London said asthma diagnosis has become “trivialized.”
“We certainly believe that asthma inhalers are being given out too readily,” Professor Bush told The Huffington Post UK.
“No lessons have been learnt over the last 15 years, and children still die because of failures in basic management,” the authors wrote in the medical journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.
“We propose that one contributing factor is that the diagnosis of asthma has been trivialised and inhalers dispensed for no good reason, and have become almost a fashion accessory.”
The authors said this results in the disease, which killed more than 1,200 people in 2014, not being correctly managed.
Potential side effects for children incorrectly using asthma inhalers include “growth suppression and reduction in immune activity in the airways,” they stated.
