Abnormal breath sounds like wheezes, crackles and stridor at times manifest similar morphologies and pathological features of lung airways obstruction. This may pose problems to proper diagnosis and evaluation of the underlying respiratory condition by human auscultation. In this study, the authors experimented with Time-Frequency threshold-dependent (TFTD) algorithm for detection and classific...

Heavy traffic is a source of air pollution and a safety concern with important public health implications. We investigated whether green space lowers child asthma risk by buffering the effects of heavy traffic and a lack of neighborhood safety. Multilevel models were used to analyze affirmative asthma cases in nationally representative cross-sectional data from 4447 children aged 6-7 years old ...

To investigate the prevalence of smoking, asthma and asthma-related symptoms in relation to age, sex and smoking behaviour in Urmia, we carried out a cross-sectional study in 2004 using the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease questionnaire, which includes some questions on smoking. We surveyed 2987 adults aged 20-44 years. Prevalence of wheeze, breathlessness with wheezing...

A cross sectional survey of 3321 school going children (5-15 years) using modified ISAAC questionnaire in Jaipur city showed 7.59% children to have asthma (in last 12 months) and 8.4% wheezing in last 12 months. Only 5.3% children had physician diagnosed asthma ever suggesting under diagnoses.

Results Six trials (n = 491) met criteria for inclusion. Patients who received b-agonists by MDI+VHC showed a significant decrease in the admission rate compared with those by nebulizer (OR, 0.42; 95% CI, 0.24-0.72; P = .002); this decrease was even more significant among children with moderate to severe exacerbations (OR, 0.27; 95% CI, 0.13-0.54; P = .0003). Finally, measure of severity (eg, c...

Background Several studies on population basis have been carried out to determine prevalence and incidence of recurrent wheezing phenotypes and its predictor factors. Among those, factors have been described related to the prenatal, early life and environment characteristics.This article evaluates the prevalence and the associated factors of recurrent wheezing phenotypes in asthma control progr...

Background. In recurrent wheezing infants, it is important to identify those likely to remain asthmatic in order to propose appropriate long-term management. Objective. To establish predictive factors for persistent asthma at adolescence in a population of recurrent wheezing infants. Methods. Retrospective study of 227 infants. Inclusion criteria were age under 36 months, a history of at least ...

Although background noise cancellation for speech or electrocardiographic recording is well established, however when the background noise contains vocal noises and the main signal is a breath sound, the problem becomes challenging as the signal and noise are no longer uncorrelated. In this paper, a technique for detecting the vocal noise within a breath sound and then removing it without hampe...