Use of MP3 players to increase asthma knowledge in inner-city African-American adolescents

Abstract

Low-income African-American adolescents suffer a disproportionate burden of asthma morbidity. To evaluate the ability of our intervention, the Adolescents' Disease Empowerment and Persistency Technology (ADEPT) for asthma, to increase asthma knowledge in our target population. This was a 14-week (2-week run-in and 12-week treatment) randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled pilot study in which 28 inner-city African-American adolescents with asthma, between 10 and 18 years of age, were randomized to receive (1) celebrity asthma messages (experimental group), or (2) general health messages (control group) between music tracks on an MP3 player. The asthma messages were recorded by famous athletes, musicians, and other celebrities popular among this group of teenagers. Asthma knowledge, assessed by the ZAP Asthma Knowledge instrament, was collected pre- and post-intervention. Mean improvement in ZAP score was significantly higher in the experimental group (8.1%, SD 7.2%) than the control group (0.4%, SD 7.2%) (p = 0.05). These findings suggest that this may be an innovative and promising new approach to improving asthma outcomes in this difficult-to-reach population.