Assessment of health-related quality of life in paediatric asthma patients

Abstract

Background: Bronchial Asthma is one of the important chronic disease in children. This disease can affect the children mentally and physically in various aspects. Health related quality of life (HRQoL) has become an increasing important issue in the management of Asthma and it is how often used to evaluate the effectiveness of antiasthma drugs. The objectives of the study are to assess the health-related quality of life in Pediatric patients by using Pediatric Asthma quality of life questionnaire and also to assess the impact of parent education in health-related quality life of Asthma patient. The other intention of the study is to determine the anti-asthma drugs utilisation pattern in Pediatric patients.Methods: This study was conducted in in-patient and out-patient department of tertiary care Hospital for a period of 1 year. 145 pediatric patients were participated in this study. A comparative study was conducted to describe the HRQoL in asthma and the pediatric asthma quality of life questionnaire is used to determine the HRQoL of the subjects. Statistical analysis was performed using the instant prism ANOVA test and the Bartlett’s test. P <0.05 was considered statistically significant.Results: This study shows that asthma is more common in male compared to female and most common type was Mild Persistent (47.85). Most of the patient are treated with bronchodilator (71%) followed by steroid (49%) and Leukotrien Antagonist (30.43%). Also revealed that most of the patients are taking multiple drug therapy compared to mono therapy. Quality of life having significant difference in all domains by comparing first visits score. Those suffering from the intermittent type of asthma showed higher mean quality of life score in all domains by comparing first visit score vs second visit score vs third visit score.Conclusions: The health-related quality of life having improvement in all domain and overall quality of life by comparing the initial visit to the follow up visits. The patient education plays major role in improving the quality of life of pediatric population and the quality of life score having relationship with gender, age educational status, severity of asthma and the drug utilization improving health related quality of life.