Current status and strategies of asthma questionnaire application in China

Abstract

The prevalence of bronchial asthma in China is 4.2%, similar to other countries around the world, but the mortality rate of asthma in China is 36.7 /100 000, which is four times as high as that of Japan and seven times as that of the United States. Therefore, It is urgent for China to strengthen the effectiveness of asthma management and minimize the risk of related deaths. Pivotal aspects of asthma management involve screening and assessing symptom control. Simple screening tools expedite rapid identification of patients who require more detailed assessment in primary medical care. Numerical tools like ACT and ACQ are widely used in clinical practice and clinical research. Categorical symptom control tools are extensively used in clinical studies. For example,asthma APGAR (Activities, Persistence, Triggers, Asthma medications, Response to therapy) questionnaire not only assists in assessing asthma, but also in enhancing treatment adherence, improving asthma control. Currently, some asthma questionnaires face limitations in their application in China, particularly concerning sociocultural factors, specific age groups, and heterogeneous phenotypes. More attention should be paid to individualized factors (age diverse, clinical phenotypes), and use of biomarkers and intelligent technologies in questionnaire design for enhancing management of asthma.

Keywords

• |asthma|asthma management|control questionnaires|prevalence|cough variant asthma