Cardiopulmonary Fitness in Children With Asthma Versus Healthy Children

Asthma is the most common chronic disease in children worldwide. Asthma is characterised by a chronic inflammatory disorder of the airways,episodes of wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness and coughing. There is a large variability of asthma prevalence between countries from 11 to 15% for children in developed countries. Asthma may limit the patient's ability to be physically active and can lead to a sedentary lifestyle and affect patients' quality of life. Indeed, long-term goal of asthma management as any chronic disease is to control symptoms in order to ensure a normal quality of life to children with asthma In 1980, the World Health Organization stated that functional capacity explorations best reflect the impact of a chronic disease on the quality of life. Indeed, cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPET) has become the "gold standard" in functional evaluation of cardiorespiratory diseases in adults gradually extended to children. Physical fitness is evaluated by maximal oxygen uptake "VO2 max" during a CPET. CPET also allows to determine possible limiting factors (cardiac limitation, ventilatory limitation, muscular deconditioning) responsible for a lower VO2max. There is actually contradictory evidence regarding the aerobic fitness levels of asthmatic children and it remains unclear whether significant differences exist between asthmatic children and their non-asthmatic counterparts. Few studies suggest ventilatory exercise limitations linked to the severity of bronchial obstruction whether others put in light the impact of muscular deconditioning in the asthmatic population. In this context, the investigators aimed to compare the cardiopulmonary fitness of children with asthma with that of age-adjusted and gender-adjusted controls. The investigators also intended to identify clinical characteristics associated with VO2max in this population.