Andrea Pappalardo, MD, FAAAAI, FACAAI

Pappalardo reports consulting for FARE, Northwestern University and OptumRX; receiving grants from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, the American Lung Association, FARE, National Institutes of Health and Respiratory Health Association; and receiving honoraria from the American Academy of Pediatrics, Illinois Critical Access Hospital Network and the Wisconsin Allergy Society.

April 01, 2025

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VIDEO: Regular follow-up ‘really important’ for monitoring pediatric patients with asthma

Transcript

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

So the guidelines really help us here, but really you don't want to kind of go, "Good luck, see you later, see you in a year for your followup for well-child," because a lot of the care, I mean, I'm an allergist, so I see children as a subspecialty, but many of their kids that have asthma are being seen by their pediatrician or their pediatric clinician that might not be a pediatric provider. And so the monitoring for the guidelines will tell us that, you know, when you go to the well-child visit every year, you need to be seen more than that. So depending on how someone's doing, if someone's doing really well, they can be seen every, you know, 3 to 6 months that you wanna check in. Because as you know, every 3 months, if you're living in a place like Chicago, where I live, there's a change in weather. There's also change in patterns even in the warm climates of what is blooming wind. And so these things can cause different people to react to different times.

So I tend to like to follow up every 3 to 6 months. If someone I've been seeing for a while, I already know their ups and downs, and they're always this, they get worse in the spring and they flare then, or a winter flarer, or they flare all the time, you know, you would change that. But the fact of the matter is, is that if you have asthma, you should be seen more than once a year outside of that well-child visit for your asthma.

Sometimes people don't feel problems, but there's problems going on within them and that is gonna be really important to continue to follow up and monitor. And some people are better at feeling things and some people are like, you know, doing their thing and not feeling it. So it's important to have these monitoring of, "Hey, do you have a high inflammation when I check your breathing?" These kind of things.