Viral wheeze

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My 21 month old has has regular fairly severe episodes of viral wheeze since he was just under a year. Lots of A&E visits and several admissions for oxygen.

He’s allergic to all sorts/has eczema/my DH is similar so the presumption is he has some underlying asthma and he was started on inhaled steroids when he was 18 months. On the whole things have been much better since then but he’s had 2 colds since then both of which have led to horrible wheezing.

His paediatrician is fairly sure that he’ll outgrow the viral induced wheezing element and I very much hope that’s true. Has anyone else had this with their DC? Did they outgrow it? If so when?

We had / have similar - he hasn’t totally grown out of it, but he also hasn’t yet developed asthma.

We saw a private paeds respiratory consultant who gave us an inhaler action plan and some montelukast to use only when required (as opposed to constantly). It helped. We also had quite a few doses of dexamethasone has he had recurrent croup.

I’d say the A&E visits for breathing difficulties reduced quite significantly around 3 maybe? He’s 7 now and still needs his inhaler when he has a cold or is exposed to allergens but otherwise much better (fingers crossed!).

Hope that helps.

Oh one other thing that helped was giving Piriton when he gets a snotty cold - this is an off label use of the medicine but was recommended by a GP. Basically it dries up the post nasal drip that triggered the coughs and wheezing. Not a fail safe but helps around half the time he starts developing one of “those” coughs.

Thanks that’s really helpful. Yeah one of my worries is that he’s now going to be labelled as having asthma and it will ‘stick’.

90% of the time that we end up at hospital he sounds dreadful but after 20-30 puffs salbutamol he settles. I feel like we could just do this at home but the amount of salbutamol is way above what’s on his wheeze plan (and like I say a few times he’s needed some oxygen) so I feel guilty that we end up using so much A&E time!

My daughter was hospitalised with bronchiolitis when she was 10 months old and then suffered with viral induced for 7 years. We had a total of around 12 hospital admissions, 5 of which were high dependency stays and many more A&E visits. She was prescribed Montelukast daily for a couple of years and was under the respiratory team as an outpatient and then she moved to Clenil preventative inhaler daily plus salbutamol inhaler when the viral wheeze started which she has recently stopped aged 8.
Our respiratory team told us with cases like ours they try and wait to give an asthma diagnosis until age 7 if they can as so many children have viral induced wheeze when young that goes as they grow and I am pleased to say that this has been the case with us.
From being in hospital with every cold up to age 5 to then being able to manage her symptoms between ages 5-8 at home with inhalers, we now only have the salbutamol inhaler which we haven't had to use at all in the last year.

Yes, DS had several hospital admissions with this when he was an older baby/toddler, ending up on a nebuliser each time, including three or four nights in rural France, which was challenging language-wise.

For Ds, lockdown helped, as he stopped getting infections and colds, and this gave him time to grow as your doctors have said. He is now 6 and has been inhaler-free since lockdown. Hang on in there and hopefully your DS will also outgrow it.

Yes and it stopped as soon as we moved out of a damp flat...never to return.

Yes DC1 had number of hospital admission between around 2.5 years and 3.5 years when she was finally given a preventer inhaler and that completely controlled the (by that time) asthma. Never needed blue inhaler since. She stopped preventer inhaler at age 12.

She was eventually treated as having asthma (at around age 5) but no issues really related to that.