Knowledge of asthma among parents of asthmatic children

Introduction: Asthma is a heterogeneous disease characterised by chronic airway inflammation. It is considered as one among the most common chronic disease in childhood in the first world countries. WHO estimates shows that some 235 million people currently suffer from asthma. In the last 10 years, the proportion of Indian school children suffering from bronchial asthma has increased to more than double and has reached its highest level ever. Parent education programmes form an integral component of asthma management. Identification of the factors, associated with the parental knowledge regarding asthma, will help to facilitate the effectiveness of educational programmes. Objectives: To assess the level of understanding and beliefs held by parents of asthmatic children regarding the causation, prognosis and treatment of asthma. Methodology: A cross sectional descriptive study, data was collected using a semi-structured questionnaire from parents of asthmatic children between 3-18 years during the study period of two years. Normally distributed continuous variables were expressed as mean (SD), non-normally distributed continuous variables as median and range. Categorical data were presented using numbers and percentages. The Chi-square or Fisher exact test was used for discrete variables. Parametric or non –parametric test of independent t-test was used to explore relationship between the variables. All analytical procedures were done by using Stata13.1 (College Station, Texas, USA) and a 5% significance level was considered. Results: When compared to the previous studies, parental awareness of childhood asthma has increased significantly.Those parents who were more literate were more aware of the disease.There was statistically significant association between the literacy of parents and their acceptance of the disease asthma (p-0.002). Significant number of the parents (64%) knew about genetic etiology of asthma. Among the parents who accepted that their child has asthma majority were from urban area, and this number was statistically significant (p-0.03). When the child developed acute exacerbation, more than half of the parents were able to initiate management at home. Significant percentage of parents raised concerns on the long term use of aerosol treatment. Statistically significant association was found between the educational status of parents and the increasing concerns on inhaler medications( p-0.03, p-0.04). Conclusion: Comprehensive parental education targeting on importance of long term treatment, remarkable safety profile of medications would help in achieving better asthma control in children.