Daily Dose: Pediatric Asthma Risk Score

Patient Care brings primary care clinicians a lot of medical news every day—it’s easy to miss an important study. The Daily Dose provides a concise summary of one of the website's leading stories you may not have seen.

On February 22, 2023, we reported on a study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and will be presented at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology that confirmed the effectiveness of the Pediatric Asthma Risk Score (PARS).

The study

Researchers compared PARS directly to the Asthma Predictive Index (API) and validated it in 10 cohorts with varying race, ethnicity, sex, cohort type, missing data, and birth decades, and then performed a meta-analysis across all 10 cohorts. They used data from 5674 children participating in the Children’s Respiratory and Environmental Workgroup. They applied both PARS and API in each cohort, as well as harmonized data across all cohorts, and directly compared the ability of each tool to predict asthma development between ages 5-10 years. Investigators observed that PARS area under the curve (AUC) was significantly higher than the AUC of the API in 9 cohorts (p-value range .01 to <.001), according to the study abstract. PARS AUC did not differ by cohort type (high risk or general population), decade of enrollment, race, sex, ethnicity, missing PARS factors or polysensitization definition (skin prick test vs specific IgE).

Note from authors

"This multi-cohort study makes the PARS the most validated model of asthma prediction in children to date, not only with respect to the number of cohorts used but also with regards to capturing the diversity of asthma in the United States. Future studies may consider PARS the new gold standard in pediatric asthma risk prediction.”

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