The Asthma Therapy Assessment Questionnaire (ATAQ) for Children and Adolescents

Abstract

The Asthma Therapy Assessment Questionnaire (ATAQ) for children and adolescents was developed to assist clinicians and health plans to identify children at risk for adverse outcomes of asthma. ATAQ is a brief, 20-item parent-completed questionnaire that generates indicators of potential care problems in several categories, including symptom control, behavior and attitude barriers, self-efficacy barriers, and communication gaps. This paper describes testing of the internal consistency and construct validity of the instrument. A cross-sectional mail survey with telephone follow-up was conducted with parents of 434 children aged 5-17 years being treated for asthma and enrolled in three managed care organizations in the Midwestern and Northeastern United States. ATAQ scales were evaluated using correlations with measures of health status, asthma impact, and healthcare utilization. ATAQ demonstrated good internal consistency and the hypothesized relationships to corresponding measures from existing instruments. Asthma control was significantly associated with measures of physical health, psychosocial health, resource use, and family impact. "Shared decision making," an indicator of patient-provider communication and involvement of the parent and child in developing asthma management plans, was significantly and positively associated with symptoms and parental satisfaction. Other ATAQ components showed similar associations. ATAQ appears to have satisfactory measurement properties and is ready for use to identify patients who might benefit from further disease management efforts or medical attention.

Impact of Student Pharmacist-Delivered Asthma Education on Child and Caregiver Knowledge

“…Parental report of asthma diagnosis was used along with Spirometry (KoKo Legend portable spirometer, Inspire Health, Longmont, CO) and the Asthma Therapy Assessment Questionnaire (ATAQ) 14 to classify lung function in all children attending the camps, regardless of prior asthma diagnosis. The asthma screening classification system was used in this study is described in Table 1.…”

Asthma Control Assessment Tools

“…Respondents are graded as either having or not having a control problem in each one of these 4 items; the item scores are then summed to provide a total, which ranges from 0 (no asthma control problems) to 4 (4 asthma control problems). 8,40,66,67 Skinner et al 71 developed a parent completed ATAQ version to identify children and adolescents (5-17 y old) with current problems in asthma control. This version was derived from the adult version developed by Vollmer et al 66 …”

“…However, in the developmental study of the children and adolescent ATAQ, the Cronbach ␣ of .75 indicated good internal consistency of the ATAQ. 71 …”

The Role of Questionnaires in the Assessment of Asthma Control

“…It consists of 20 questions addressed to the parent. A large number of questions hinders some of its application in an outpatient setting, but studies have shown that it is a valuable tool and should be used [19].…”