According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 6 million children have asthma in the United States. Jennifer Couceyro, Advanced Registered Nurses Practitioner with Baptist Children’s Hospital, explains the difference between asthma in kids and adults is that the bronchioles and the whole respiratory tract in children are smaller than they are in adults.

“Asthma is a reactive disease, the airways are reacting to various different things, they either are reacting to inflammation from allergy, they can be reacting to infectious agents or to exposure to certain things in the environment, so it’s a reactive airway disease,” she says.