Primary health care research & development
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Prim Health Care Res Dev · Oct 2011
The natural history of acute upper respiratory tract infections in children.
To describe the natural history of acute upper respiratory tract infections (AURIs) in primary-school children, by recording their daily symptoms. ⋯ Diaries were returned from 223 children, of whom 146 had had an AURI. The average age was eight years, and there were almost equal numbers of boys and girls. The most frequent symptoms were runny nose, cough, feeling unwell and sore throat. There was a biphasic distribution with systemic symptoms in the first three days characterised by fever, poor sleep, irritability, not playing and headache. By day four, symptoms localising the infection to the upper respiratory tract appeared with runny nose, cough, sore throat and poor appetite; these continued into the second and occasionally third week. Most symptoms lasted for 5-11 days, with a median length for all symptoms of seven days. Symptoms defined by parents tended to be scored less for severity than symptoms defined by children.