Half A Million Children With Asthma Are ‘Overdiagnosed,’ Study Claims

A new study, published in the British Journal of General Practice, revealed that more than half a million children in the United Kingdom are receiving unnecessary treatment after being "wrongly" diagnosed with asthma. The researchers claimed that most general practitioners (GPs) failed to properly assess the children, resulting to overdiagnosis.

The Huffing Post reported that the study, conducted by the researchers from University Medical Center in Utrecht, claims that 53.5 percent of more than one million Brit kids who have been diagnosed with asthma may not actually have the condition. The researchers blamed the alarming figure to doctors' failure to properly examine kids in surgeries or perform appropriate lung function tests.

The researchers conducted a retrospective analysis on 652 childhood asthma cases from four health care centers in Utrecht. They found out that more than one-half of the children did not demonstrate clinical signs of the condition.

"Overdiagnosis of asthma was found in more than half of the children, leading to unnecessary treatment, disease burden, and impact on their quality of life," Dr. Ingrid Looijmans-van den Akker, lead researcher, told The Telegraph. "Previous studies have indicated that asthma is over-diagnosed in children. However, the scale of has not been quantified."

Looijmans-van den Akker added that despite being recommended in international guidelines, only a few of the children's diagnosis used lung function tests. "Overdiagnosis gives rise to overprescription and incorrect use of medication, and to anxiety in parents and children."

The recent findings have prompted the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) to inspect how GPs perform asthma diagnosis in the UK. According to The Guardian, Nice has already advised GPs to support their suspicions from patients' symptoms with appropriate tests before making any diagnosis.

Moreover, Dan Murphy, director of external affairs at Asthma UK, argued that getting a definitive diagnosis is difficult because the condition has complex causes.

"It is also a highly variable condition that can change throughout someone's life or even week by week, meaning treatment also needs to change over time," he said.