• Posted June 17, 2025

Digital Tool Potentially Predicts Childhood Asthma

TUESDAY, June 17, 2025 (HealthDay News) — A new digital tool can flag kids who are at risk for developing childhood asthma, researchers report.

The tool scans electronic health data records and calculates an asthma risk score for children, according to results published recently in eClinical Medicine.

It relies on information that’s routinely collected as part of kids’ medical history, researchers said.

"Our hope is that using the childhood asthma passive digital marker in clinical practice will improve the early detection of asthma risk in high-risk children, allowing for earlier interventions that could improve asthma control and lessen the future risk of hospitalization," lead researcher Arthur Owora, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, said in a news release.

For the study, researchers used the tool to comb through records of more than 69,000 Indiana children born between 2010 and 2017, of whom just under 8% had been diagnosed with asthma after age four.

The digital tool was better able to predict which kids at age 3 had a higher risk of developing childhood asthma, results show.

The tool predicted asthma among 37% of those children, versus 26% using an earlier pediatric asthma risk score, researchers found.

Results suggest pneumonia and bronchiolitis are two of the most powerful predictors for childhood asthma, the study says.

The new tool could be an easily adopted means of helping doctors detect children at high risk for asthma, researchers concluded.

"This passive digital marker is very scalable because it requires zero additional minutes from the clinical team by using the already captured data in the electronic health record," senior researcher Dr. Malaz Boustani, director of the IU Center for Health Innovation and Implementation Science, said in a news release.

Prompt diagnosis of asthma can help parents and kids better avoid asthma triggers and improve use of asthma inhalers, researchers said.

"Scalable innovations like this in pediatrics have unbelievable public health impact for the health of the future generation of Americans,” Boustani added.

The team next plans to test the tool using a randomized clinical trial, to see if it actually increases early diagnoses among children at high risk of asthma.

"If the trial is successful, we will explore scaling up the implementation to ensure the benefits of early detection are realized at the state and hopefully at the national level as well," Owora said.

More information

The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology has more on childhood asthma.

SOURCE: Indiana University, news release, June 11, 2025