Previous research reported about high comorbidity between asthma and neurodevelopmental disorders. Recently, asthma was associated also with executive functions poorness. The current study aimed to investigate the verbal and visual memory performances among fifteen asthmatic kindergarten children compared to the performances of other fifteen healthy kindergarten children. The results showed that the asthmatic group revealed poor performances in the immediate short term verbal memory and the verbal working memory tests but not in the verbal learning test as it was compared to the healthy group. In addition, the asthmatic group revealed poor performances in the visual memory tasks compared to the healthy group. The results were explained in light of the assumption that poor executive functions might be interfere the process of managing the attentional resources which are needed through the process of memory encoding and retrieval.
Asthma is one of the most common non-infectious respiratory diseases in horses. Ultrasound examination is a widely available non-invasive additional diagnostic tool. To date, there are no studies focusing on ultrasonographic findings in horses with asthma. The aim of this study was to analyse the prevalence and severity of ultrasound lesions in lung tissue in horses with asthma. Lung ultrasonography was carried out on six healthy horses (controls) and 12 horses with asthma (six with mild and six with severe asthma). The sonographic changes in three lung sections were assessed using a scoring system. The most common changes present in all the animals were comet- tail artefacts. More advanced lesions were present in horses with severe asthma. Statistically significant differences in the overall average intensity of the ultrasound changes were seen between the controls and the study group and between the horses with mild and severe asthma. The lesions were usually located in the caudal lung regions, but they were also present in other areas as the disease progressed. Ultrasonography is a useful additional diagnostic tool enabling an assessment of the stage of the asthma progression. It is a very sensitive technique that visualizes minor lesions in the lung tissue even in clinically healthy animals. Due to its low specificity, it cannot replace endoscopy and the bronchoalveolar lavage in horses with asthma.