ABSTRACT
Not all languages include a word for “wheeze.” Whether a missing term in certain languages indicates the lack of necessity to describe such a phenomenon remains a linguistic riddle. However, the spatial distribution of the prevalence of wheeze and asthma is extremely heterogeneous, ranging from almost nonexistent in some areas to an illness affecting almost half the population in other regions. The large variation in the occurrence of such symptoms and diagnoses is likely to be caused by a multitude of host and environmental factors and their specific interactions, most of which we do not understand or even recognize. Furthermore, wheezing syndromes do not represent a single entity, but most likely are the relatively uniform clinical manifestations of a wide array of various underlying pathological mechanisms affecting a multitude of systems such as the airways, immune responses, and neural systems, to name only a few.
