[Quality of life in asthmatics]

Despite the availability of effective treatments asthma is increasing in both prevalence and severity specially in the well developed countries. As a consequence of this a large part of population is affected and the disease has a significant burden to the society. Evaluation of therapeutic effectiveness can be determined by measuring the quality of life.

As asthma has a major impact on the patients everyday life, we examined the quality of life of adult asthmatics with a disease specific questionniare (St. George's Respiratory questionniare SGRQ) and a visual analogue scale (VAS). We wanted to find out if the quality of life scores are significant with the results of clinical tests.

We examined 321 adult asthmatic patients. Patients were randomly selected. The influence of three factors age, sex, and FEV1 on quality of life was investigated. The data was analysed with user SPSS system.

The results of the visuala analog scale were the following in female asthmatics 61.38%, in males 63.86%, the VAS results were the following according to the disease severity: mild intermittant 76%, mild 69%, moderate 60%, sever 49%. From the St. George questionniare three component scores were calculated: symptom (304.15 +/- 11.01), activity (580.71 +/- 19.57), impact (842.18 +/- 31.53) and the total score (1727.05 +/- 57.24). When we examined the different scores according to the age we found significant differences with the activity, impact and total score, but could not find significant differences with the symptom scores. The relationship between spirometry and quality of life is not as strong (coefficient of correlation: 0.37) but the majority of patients have high SGRQ scores even those patients whose FEV1 lies within the normal range.

For patients with asthma it is common that one might see improvement in the FEV1 and yet not see an improvement in patients feelings or functioning. It was interesting to see that in spite of their bad conditions patients do accept the chronic nature of asthma, a degree of impairment and regard that as normal, limits in their everyday life, as they adjust their activity so that they can avoid the asthma attacks.