الفهرس 
Acknowledgment
Episodic viral wheeze (EVWOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Summary and conclusion
Wheezing disorders are very common during childhood (particularly among preschool children), and represent a significant burden for the patients, their families, the healthcare system, and society as a whole. Most wheezing episodes causing hospitalization or emergency department (ED) visits in preschool children are associated with viral respiratory tract infections.
The study included 50 children aged 1 to 6 years (24 male and 26 female) with acute wheezing episodes present to the Emergency Departments (ED), Assiut University Children Hospital to investigate the efficacy of inhaled hypertonic saline 3% treatment. The primary outcome measured was length of stay (LOS) and the secondary outcomes were admission rate (AR) and clinical severity score after inhalation of salbutamol (5mg/ ml) with either normal saline 0.9 % (routine) or hypertonic saline 3% . In our study asthma severity was determined using Asthma clinical severity score adopted from Qureshi et al (1998).
Our study showed that adding HS inhalations to common practice treatment significantly shortens LOS by 27 % (1.1 day) {mean 2.9 days in HS group (range 0–5 days), versus 4 days in NS group (range 0–6 days), (P <0.033)}. However, the admission rate (AR) was insignificantly lower in the HS group than the NS group 40% vs 56% (table 4).
It could be concluded that the use of inhaled hypertonic saline is effective in the management of wheezy children attending Assiut University Children Hospital. It improves significantly the asthma clinical severity score of such children. It also decreases significantly the period of hospital stay compared to normal saline inhalation.