Bronchial asthma is the leading chronic lower respiratory tract disease in children. Its variability and course in paediatric patients is very different from that in adults.
Therefore in recent years several consensus documents and international guidelines focusing on paediatric asthma were published. This review compares the two most important documents published on this topic - PRACTALL (2008), first document focusing exclusively on childhood asthma, and ICON (2012).
ICON highlights the key messages that are common to many of the existing guidelines, while critically reviewing and commenting on any differences, thus providing a concise reference.