1.Background
Asthma in children is a common non-infectious chronic respiratory disease characterized by episodic and persistent airflow restriction, with symptoms of wheezing, coughing, chest tightness and shortness of breath [1,2]. Asthma has become more common globally in recent years, which is one of the most important global public health problems. It is estimated that around 300 million people suffer from asthma, and the incidence of asthma is likely to increase as the proportion of the urban population increases [3]. The prevalence of asthma in children (9.5%) is higher than adults (7.7%), and women (9.2%) higher than men (7.0%) [4]. Approximately 157,000 children hospitalized with asthma and 640,000 emergency room visits are recorded in the United States [5]. Asthma negatively affects children’s quality of life, exercise capacity, and lung function, while increasing family stress and socioeconomic burden [6]. Treatment goals for childhood asthma are to minimize the negative impact of these events and prevent their recurrence.
Currently, β2-agonists and glucocorticoids, as the main drugs for childhood asthma, are widely used in clinical practice, but most of the drugs have side effects. Therefore, safer and more effective interventions are being explored. As a core component of non-drug therapy, PR is a comprehensive intervention that mainly includes exercise training, family education, and health education, aiming to improve the physical and mental health of patients and promote long-term health [7,8]. Exercise training as the cornerstone of PR, mainly including endurance training, resistance/strength training, inspiratory muscle training, interval training, and neuromuscular electrical stimulation [8], and has been shown to improve asthma symptoms and severity, quality of life, and lung function [9-11]. After a search we found that formal PR programs are very rare in a child environment, and there is a lack of data describing potential benefits for childhood asthma, especially whether exercise-based PR can be used as an adjunctive treatment for childhood asthma. Thus, this systematic review aimed to systematize the different designs used to provide exercise-based PR designs for childhood asthma and explore which ones are the most effective.
METHODS