Abstract

There are predictive indexes to identify asthmatic patients from the rest of the recurrent wheezing phenotypes. The aim of this work was to evaluate the association between the positive Asthma Predictive Index (API) and the presence of asthma between the age of six and seven years old, in children from Valdivia, Chile. Methods: API was applied to 101 asthmatic children (cases) and 100 non-asthmatic children (controls). Data were analyzed using STATA v. 11 (2009). Fisher Exact Test was used to determine the relationship between variables. Results: 72.3% of asthmatic patients and 3% of non- asthmatic patients had a positive index. Significant differences (p < 0.001) were shown in all the variables included in the API. In our group of patients, the probability for a child to develop asthma was at least 24 times higher if he/she had a positive API (OR = 84.3 CI95% 24.1-436.5). Conclusion: API is a good tool to predict asthma and allows to take right decisions in recurrent wheezing children younger than 36 months old.