Differences in health care utilisation and workdays lost between individuals with and without asthma

The study aims to compare health care utilisation and workdays lost for individuals with and without asthma in Sweden. Individual data on self-perceived asthma problems, self-reported utilisation of outpatient care and official data on inpatient care, and official data on workdays lost was obtained from the HILDA database (health and individuals: longitudinal data and analysis). The study covered 13,000 individuals. Independent t-tests were performed to compare average differences in primary care visits, emergency room visits, days in hospital and workdays lost. Individuals with severe asthma, as compared with the general population, were found to utilise primary care visits, emergency room visits and hospitalisation according to the following ratios: 1.9(:1), 4.9 and 4.3 per year, respectively. For workdays lost the ratio was 1.9. All differences were statistically significant. For individuals reporting mild asthma, no significant differences were found compared with the general population. This finding may be due to the success of asthma management in this population. Both the official data and the self-reported data provided evidence of the burden of asthma to individuals and society. Briefly, self-reported severe asthmatics utilised 2-5 times more resources than the general population, while there were no differences in resource utilisation between self-reported mild asthmatics and the general population.