Development and multicenter study on Korean pediatric asthma quality of life questionnaire (KPAQLQ)

Cha, Jae Kook; Oh, Jae Won; Hong, Soo Jong; Lee, Hae Ran; Lee, Myung Ik; Kim, Kyu Earn; Lee, Joon Sung; Lee, Ha Baik; Lee, Sang Il

Abstract

BACKGROUND
AND OBJECT: Traditional asthma outcome measures such as symptoms, spirometry, and medication requirements usually provide valuable information about the asthmatic status but they rarely capture the functional impairments. Thus, many clinicians are increasingly recognizing the importance of an assessment of health-related quality of life (HRQL) as an outcome measure in asthma. We developed a questionnaire to measure asthma-specific quality of life in Korean children and evaluated the measurement properties.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
The questionnaire for children with asthma included 14 items in three domains (symptoms-6 items, activity limitation-4 items, and emotional function-4 items) and the response options for each item were on a 5-point scale where 1 indicated maximum impairment and 5 indicated no impairment. Results were expressed as the mean score for overall quality of life as well as for each of the domains. At follow-up clinic visit, patients completed global assessment of change related to their symptoms, activities and emotions. We recruited children (7~17 years of age) with asthma from thirty-three general hospitals.
RESULTS
Data from 214 patients (144 boys and 70 girls) who completed the questionnaire were analyzed. The mean age was 10.0 years and the disease severity consisted of mild intermittent (26.6%), mild persistent (36.0%), moderate persistent (32.2%), and severe persistent (3.3%). The questionnaire for children with asthma showed a high index of responsiveness, reproducibility, and both longitudinal and cross-sectional correlations with the conventional asthma indices and with the questionnaire score. But there was no relationship between changes in questionnaire score of the domain of emotional function and changes in FEV1 or PEFR.
CONCLUSION
The questionnaire of children is straight forword, and easy to apply.