Development and initial validation of the Asthma Severity Scoring System (ASSESS)

Area of Science:

• Pulmonology
• Clinical Research
• Biostatistics

Background:

• Current tools for quantifying asthma severity are limited.
• There is a need for a comprehensive and continuous measure of asthma severity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate the Asthma Severity Scoring System (ASSESS) for adolescents and adults.
• To incorporate domains of asthma control, lung function, medications, and exacerbations into a single score.
• To assess the utility of ASSESS in detecting treatment response.

Main Methods:

• Utilized longitudinal data from phase 3 of the Severe Asthma Research Program.
• Determined scale properties, responsiveness, and minimally important difference.
• Performed external replication and explored utility in corticosteroid and biologic treatment studies.

Main Results:

• ASSESS scores range from 0 to 20, with higher scores indicating worse severity.
• The tool demonstrated acceptable measurement properties and responsiveness to changes in quality of life.
• A 2-point decrease in ASSESS indicated improvement, correlating with better lung function and asthma control in specific phenotypic groups and overall with biologic treatment.

Conclusions:

• The ASSESS tool offers an objective measure for quantifying asthma severity and treatment response in research.
• It may be valuable in epidemiologic and clinical studies for assessing individual patients and phenotypic groups.
• Further validation studies are recommended to confirm its utility.