Editorial
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Clin Pediatr. May 8, 2015; 4(2): 13-18
Published online May 8, 2015. doi: 10.5409/wjcp.v4.i2.13
Clinical asthma phenotyping: A trial for bridging gaps in asthma management
Magdy Mohamed Zedan, Wafaa Nabil Laimon, Amal Mohamed Osman, Mohamed Magdy Zedan
Magdy Mohamed Zedan, Wafaa Nabil Laimon, Amal Mohamed Osman, Mohamed Magdy Zedan, Department of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology, Mansoura Faculty of Medicine, Mansoura University, Mansoura 35516, Egypt
Author contributions: Zedan MM designed the research; Zedan MM and Laimon NW performed the research; Zedan MM, Laimon NW, Osman MA and Zedan MM wrote the paper.
Conflict-of-interest: None.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Magdy Mohamed Zedan, MD, Department of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology, Mansoura Faculty of Medicine, Mansoura University, Mansoura 35516, Egypt. magdyzedan@mans.edu.eg
Telephone: +20-50-2242526 Fax: +20-50-2234092
Received: January 28, 2015
Peer-review started: January 29, 2015
First decision: March 6, 2015
Revised: March 19, 2015
Accepted: April 16, 2015
Article in press: April 20, 2015
Published online: May 8, 2015
Processing time: 109 Days and 11.9 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Although asthma diagnosis is based mainly on clinical basis using history taking and physical examination, treatment options are not tailored according to the clinical phenotype. We still do not have a way to work up a given patient with asthma and to easily delineate the specific pathobiology that leads to her or his airway dysfunction. We can recognize the clinical syndromes, but we cannot spell out the steps that lead from genetic or biochemical defects to disease presentation. Thus we are left with a paradox in the study of asthma; we have effective treatments that are not biologically informative, and we have informative treatments that are less effective.