Agreement between asthma questionnaire and health care register data

Area of Science:

• Pediatric Health
• Epidemiology
• Respiratory Medicine

Background:

• Asthma research often relies on validated questionnaires to study risk factors and consequences.
• Parental reporting is a common method for gathering asthma-related information in children.
• Validating questionnaire data against objective health records is crucial for research reliability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the agreement between parental reports of asthma in children and data from Swedish healthcare registers.
• To determine the reliability of questionnaire-based asthma data for research purposes.

Main Methods:

• A population-based twin cohort of 27,055 children (aged 9-12) was linked to Swedish healthcare registers (Prescribed Drug, National Patient, primary care).
• Parental asthma reports from questionnaires were compared with register-based diagnoses and medication data.
• Cohen's kappa statistic was used to quantify the agreement between reported and register-based asthma data.

Main Results:

• Good agreement was observed between parental reports and register data for 'ever asthma' (kappa=0.69) and 'doctor's diagnosis' (kappa=0.57).
• The highest agreement for 'current asthma' was found with an 18-month time window (kappa=0.70), considering medication or diagnosis.
• Parental asthma questionnaires demonstrated substantial reliability when compared to comprehensive health registers.

Conclusions:

• Parental reporting of asthma in children shows good concordance with official Swedish healthcare registers.
• Validated, in-depth questionnaires capturing asthma phenotypes are suitable proxies for large-scale health research.
• These findings support the use of parental questionnaires in epidemiological studies of childhood asthma.