Asthma and growth.

Although recent interest in the growth of asthmatic children has centred on growth failure as a potential side effect of inhaled corticos- teroid treatment,' it has long been recognised that asthma itself can impair growth. It is now over a hundred years since Hyde Salter,2 describing the appearance of the asthmatic patient, commented that, 'if the asthma has come on young, he is generally below the average height. Some asthmatics, however ... have noth- ing whatever the matter with their appearance, and would be taken for perfectly healthy people.' They reported a spectrum of adverse effects on growth, the height being unaffected in milder cases but, with increasing severity of the allergic disease, there was impaired growth and finally delayed sexual maturation. In a later paper Cohen and Abram compared the growth of 150 allergic children with that of 102 age matched non-allergic controls and confirmed the associa- tion of uncontrolled allergy with growth impairment and found that satisfactory control of the allergic disease was associated with improved energy intake as well as satisfactory growth.4