Classifying asthma severity in children 0 to 4 years of age

Classifying severity in children who are not currently taking long-term control medication. Level of severity is determined by both impairment and risk. Assess impairment domain by caregiver's recall of the previous 2 to 4 weeks. Assign severity to the most severe category in which any feature occurs. At present, there are inadequate data to correspond frequencies of exacerbations with different levels of asthma severity. For treatment purposes, patients who had ≥2 exacerbations requiring oral glucocorticoids in the past 6 months, or ≥4 wheezing episodes in the past year, and who have risk factors for persistent asthma may be considered the same as patients who have persistent asthma, even in the absence of impairment levels consistent with persistent asthma.