Features of asthma management: quantifying the patient perspective
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Date
2007Author
Ratcliffe, Julie
Partridge, Martyn
Wolfe, Stephanie
Haughney, John
Brice, Roger
Fletcher, Monica
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Background
In the management of asthma, features of care important to patients may not be fully appreciated. This study quantifies the importance of different features of asthma management from the patient perspective. This may assist in the development of personalised management strategies.
Methods
We used the technique of discrete choice experiment (DCE). Patients over 18 years of age with asthma, prescribed and taking medicine at step 3 of the UK guidelines were recruited from 15 general (family) practices in three areas of the UK. 147 evaluable questionnaires were returned from a total of 348 sent out. The outcome measures were the relative importance to patients of features of asthma management and the impact of changes in asthma management, as measured by utility shift between the features tested.
Results
The largest shift in mean utility values was recorded in "number of inhalers" and "use of inhaled steroid". Use of a personal asthma action plan was ranked next highest.
Conclusion
This study suggests that adults with moderate or severe asthma would trade some improvements in symptom relief in favour of, for example, simpler treatment regimens that use as few inhalers as possible and a lower dose of inhaled steroid.
Description
© 2007 Haughney et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.