diagnosis of asthma includes typical symptoms and variable airflow limitation


Symptoms include wheezing, shortness of breath, tightness, cough. These symptoms have following characteristics:

  • vary over time and intensity,
  • triggered by exercise, allergens, cold air
  • worse at night or after waking up
  • worse with viral infections

Variable airflow limitations:

  • FEV/FVC below LLN
  • 20% increase in peak expiratory flow after salbutamol

  • excess variability such as with bronchodilator response, increased FEV1 from baseline after 4 weeks of treatment
  • greater the variation means more likely to have asthma diagnosis
  • could become persistent in long standing asthma:

Baseline obstruction with normalization after bronchodilator could suggest asthma, whereas baseline obstruction with failure to achieve normalization would suggest more COPD.1

Footnotes

  1. An Algorithmic Approach to Chronic Dyspnea