Background: Reported wheeze is of major relevance in the diagnosis and management of asthma and epidemiological studies on asthma prevalence. Our aim was to investigate the understanding of this term by parents and how they reported it to clinicians.
Methods: A single-centre cross-sectional observational study was carried out at a tertiary care hospital. Parents of wheezing children self-completed a written questionnaire, which was analysed to understand parental understanding of the term wheeze and the main symptoms noticed by them. Their responses were compared to the operational definition used in the ISAAC study.
Results: Questionnaires from 101 parents were analysed, out of which 50 children had an audible wheeze and 51 had an auscultatory wheeze. In our study, when asked about the main thing they noticed, 90 parents (89%) used non-auditory cues to identify wheeze, with the main presenting complaint being cough (n = 43, 42.6%), and only 4 (4%) reported wheezing. Even among the audible wheezers, only 7 (14%) used an auditory cue (alone or with some other cue) to describe their child's symptoms. Forty-seven parents knew the term wheeze, of which 19 parents (18.8%, N = 101) localised it to the chest, matching the epidemiological definition used in the ISAAC study.
Conclusion: The word wheeze was not commonly used to describe a child's symptoms in our setting, even when the child was actively wheezing. Parents often use colloquial equivalents, nonspecific terms and other clinical cues such as coughing while reporting their child's symptoms. The parental concept of "wheezing" is different from epidemiological definitions.
Keywords: Asthma; ISAAC study; cough; wheezing; whistling.