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JACI Highlights - March 2006
Schatz et al - Asthma Control Test: Reliability, validity, and responsiveness in patients not previously followed by asthma specialists
Approximately 20 million individuals in the United States (7.5% of the population) suffer from asthma, and nearly 5,000 Americans die from it each year. Therefore, asthma control is important to assess in clinical practice. To facilitate the assessment of asthma control in a busy clinical practice, tools that are easily and quickly administered and interpreted are needed. The Asthma Control Test (ACT) was developed to meet this need. The ACT is a 5-item, patient-administered survey for assessing asthma control. Dr. Schatz and colleagues evaluate the reliability and validity of the ACT in a longitudinal study in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. They found that the ACT is reliable, valid, and responsive to changes in asthma control over time in a sample of patients new to the care of an asthma specialist. Physicians are seeing a higher volume of patients within the same limited time. Given the restricted physician-patient interaction time, an accurate, reliable, and easy to use control tool may be essential in the management of asthmatic patients. The ACT was specifically designed for use at physician practices and therefore it provides a simplified assessment of control. Besides being useful as a screener for uncontrolled asthma, the ACT survey is suitable for periodic monitoring of patients with asthma. Repeatedly administered to the individual patient over time, the ACT survey may be useful in gauging the success of therapeutic interventions and in identifying deterioration in asthma control and therefore could be considered as a useful tool in clinical research as well as in clinical practice.
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