Verifying a questionnaire diagnosis of asthma in children using health claims data

BMC Pulmonary Medicine

Research Article

Richard G Foty¹  Teresa To¹  Connie L Yang²  Sharon D Dell³  David M Stieb⁴ 

[1] Child Health Evaluative Sciences, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada;Division of Respiratory Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada;Division of Respiratory Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada;Child Health Evaluative Sciences, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada;Health Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada;

关键词: Asthma;    Health Claim;    Asthma Prevalence;    Asthma Diagnosis;    Parental Proxy Report;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2466-11-52

 received in 2011-04-21, accepted in 2011-11-22,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundChildhood asthma prevalence is widely measured by parental proxy report of physician-diagnosed asthma in questionnaires. Our objective was to validate this measure in a North American population.MethodsThe 2884 study participants were a subsample of 5619 school children aged 5 to 9 years from 231 schools participating in the Toronto Child Health Evaluation Questionnaire study in 2006. We compared agreement between "questionnaire diagnosis" and a previously validated "health claims data diagnosis". Sensitivity, specificity and kappa were calculated for the questionnaire diagnosis using the health claims diagnosis as the reference standard.ResultsPrevalence of asthma was 15.7% by questionnaire and 21.4% by health claims data. Questionnaire diagnosis was insensitive (59.0%) but specific (95.9%) for asthma. When children with asthma-related symptoms were excluded, the sensitivity increased (83.6%), and specificity remained high (93.6%).ConclusionsOur results show that parental report of asthma by questionnaire has low sensitivity but high specificity as an asthma prevalence measure. In addition, children with "asthma-related symptoms" may represent a large fraction of under-diagnosed asthma and they should be excluded from the inception cohort for risk factor studies.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Yang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. This article is published under license to 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.