[Quality of life of adult asthma patients]

Concepts of quality of life are gaining in increasing significance as measures of outcome, both in medicine as well as in economics. One of the relevant questionnaires is the FLA ("Fragebogen zur Lebensqualität bei Asthma"), a disease-specific instrument for measuring the quality of life of asthma patients. This questionnaire was supplemented with a generic instrument, the EuroQol.

Adult asthma patients treated in 23 pneumological ambulatory care units were randomly selected and asked to fill out both the FLA and the EuroQol questionnaires. Separate analyses of the results were carried out for each patient severity level, and covered the average values of the subscales, the correlation as well as the internal reliability of the questionnaires.

The quality of life of asthma patients correlates strongly to the respective severity level of the illness. The patients of level 3 (serious asthma) in particular achieve values far below average when compared to the total population (42 out of 100 according to EuroQol). By contrast, the subjective quality of life of asthmatics in level 1 is only slightly reduced. The correlation of the FLA subscales as well as of the EuroQol values is high (0.74-0.97).

The study points out that as progression of the illness is associated with high losses of quality of life for the patient. From a health-economic point of view this is important for the calculation of so-called intangible costs, which are often not quantified in studies on the cost of disease.