In reply
We appreciate Dr Roberts' comments and agree that it is important to learn whether parents' reports of asthma symptoms in their children and physicians' diagnostic criteria vary across racial and ethnic groups. We would like to clarify that Dr Roberts is referring to our signal detection analysis (Figure 1 and Table 3 of the article). This analysis showed that among children younger than 10 years with a parent history of asthma or hay fever, 15.6% of African American children (group 3) vs 8.3% of white or Mexican American children (group 4) had asthma. Within these groups, 3.9% of African American children were hospitalized for wheezing vs 1.9% of white or Mexican American children.