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How important is quality of life in pediatric asthma?
1Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University Faculty of Health Sciences, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Juniper@fhs.mcmaster.ca
Insights
Assessing children's health-related quality of life (HRQL) is crucial for a complete health picture. Disease-specific questionnaires for pediatric asthma effectively measure its impact on a child's life.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric Health
- Quality of Life Research
- Respiratory Medicine
Background:
- Conventional clinical measures inadequately capture children's functional impairments.
- Parents often inaccurately perceive their children's health-related quality of life (HRQL).
- Directly assessing children's HRQL provides a more complete health status picture.
Purpose of the Study:
- To highlight the importance of incorporating HRQL assessments in pediatric clinical studies.
- To emphasize the need for direct child assessment of HRQL, as parental perception is inaccurate.
- To advocate for the routine evaluation of HRQL in children with asthma.
Main Methods:
- Utilizing disease-specific quality of life questionnaires developed for children with asthma.
- Ensuring questionnaires possess good measurement properties and validity.
- Applying these tools in both clinical trials and clinical practice.
Main Results:
- Disease-specific asthma questionnaires for children are validated and reliable.
- These tools effectively assess the impact of asthma on daily activities and emotional well-being.
- Asthma significantly impacts children's physical, emotional, and social functioning.
Conclusions:
- Evaluating HRQL is essential for comprehensive pediatric asthma care.
- Validated questionnaires enable accurate assessment of asthma's burden on children.
- Improving children's HRQL should be a key goal of asthma treatment.
Abstract:
Many pediatricians now recognize the importance of incorporating an assessment of health-related quality of life (HRQL) into their clinical studies. Conventional clinical measures provide valuable information about the status of the affected organ system but they rarely capture the functional impairments (physical, emotional, and social) that are important to the patients in their everyday lives. To obtain a complete picture of a child's health status, both the conventional clinical indices and the child's HRQL have to be measured. Parents do not perceive accurately their children's HRQL, hence it is necessary to obtain the information directly from each child. Children with asthma are distressed by the symptoms (shortness of breath, wheezing, and cough), and they are limited in their day-to-day activities (sports, school, work, and playing with pets). In addition, children are often upset and frightened by asthma attacks, and express anger (younger children) and frustration (older children) because they have asthma. They frequently feel different from their friends and get frustrated that they cannot participate in activities. Disease-specific quality of life questionnairs for children with asthma have been developed. These questionnaires have good measurement properties and validity, and can be used both in clinical trials and in clinical practice to assess the impact of asthma on a child's life. Because one of the aims of treatment is to ensure that the children benefit from treatment, an essential component of clinical assessment of these children should be the evaluation of health-related quality of life.