Value of the first 3 items of asthma control test for assessing the level of bronchial asthma control

Abstract

Objective To investigate the value of the first 3 items of asthma control test (ACT-3)for evaluating level of asthma control.Methods ACT were administered to 102 asthma patients from Nanfang Hospital.Spirometry was also used.Uncontrolled asthma was defined as ACT≤19,and well controlled asthma was defined as ACT≥20.The correlation analysis between ACT,ACT-3 and the lung funcion indexes were conducted,respectively.The property of ACT-3 for identifying the uncontrolled asthma was evaluated using receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve. And then,the agreement between ACT-3 and ACT for identifying the uncontrolled asthma was determined using kappa coefficient.Results The coefficient of correlation between the ACT-3 and ACT was 0.919 (P=0.000).Statistically significant positive correlation were observed between the ACT-3,ACT and lung funcion indexes such as forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1),percent predicted of FEV1,respectively.The areas under the ROC curve of ACT-3 for identifying the uncontrolled asthma was 0.974 (P =0.000).The optimal cutoff level of ACT-3 to discriminate between uncontrolled and well controlled asthma was 11 scores,giving 94.52％ sensitivity and 93.10％ specificity,respectively.Kappa coefficient showed a strong agreement between ACT-3 and ACT (kappa =0.858,P =0.000).Conclusions The ACT-3 is able to assess the level of asthma control,and there's a strong agreement between ACT-3≤11 and ACT≤19 for identifying the uncontrolled asthma.ACT-3 may be a good choice when the full ACT is not available. Key words: Asthma; Asthma control test; Consistency