Measures of Asthma Status: Need for Standardized Methodologies for Management (PDF)

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2010 in the subject Medicine - Hospital Environment, Clinical Medicine, grade: 4 on 4 scale (A), , language: English, abstract: Although asthma is a recognized global public health problem, there are as of yet no standardized asthma-specific measures that can be applied globally, which has led to increased number of disease status measures and, hence, difficulties in drawing conclusions on the measurements' reliability. As a fairly common disease with various causes and different symptomatology, it is expected that the need for standardized methodologies for asthma disease management will continue to grow. As a result, researchers have intensified their efforts to develop unified guidelines that can benefit different groups of patients. The main objective of this paper was to explore current measures of asthma status and the lack of consensus among researchers regarding asthma practices. The paper briefly summarizes the article entitled "Agreement Among Measures of Asthma Status: A Prospective Study of Low-Income Children with Moderate to Severe Asthma," which was published by Sharek et al. (2002), who examined the validity of parent-reported symptoms, health care utilization, functional health status, asthma diaries, and pulmonary function tests by means of correlation analyses. The present paper discusses in details the research questions that apparently had guided the validation study, namely "Which measures of asthma status are significantly correlated to asthma status (over time) of US children aged 5-12 with moderate to severe asthma?" It then presents a literature review, followed by a discussion about the significance of the study and the controversy that continues to surround the topic. The methodology used by Sharek et al. is then discussed and synthesized, and the results are reviewed. The final section of the paper offers the conclusions, implications and areas for future research.