[Quality of life among pediatric asthma patients].

Asthma is the most common chronic childhood disease. For many years improvement of symptoms and normalization of lung function have been the main goals in treatment of paediatric asthma. This conventional measures provide information about the impairement of the lung, but rarely capture the functional impairment which is the most important for the patient. In the 90' health related quality of life mesures have been developed and many clinicians recognize the importance of incorporating this assessment in order to obtain a global information of a patient's health status. The Paediatric Quality of Life Questionnaire (PAQLQ) is a specific questionnaire developed by Junniper et al which assesses the impact of asthma on the daily life of a child. It containes 23 items which cover 3 dimensions: symptoms, activities limitation and emotional function. We developed a conceptually equivalent version of the PAQLQ. In order to adapt the PAQLQ to the Spanish language, the method of translation-retranslation was used. In order to assess the measurement characteristics of the Spanish version thus obttained, a 5 week longitudinal study was undertaken with evaluations at the end of the 1st and 5th weeks. 99 asthmatic patients were included in the study. Accurate cultural adaptation should be carried on before using a health status questionnaire. Appropriate translation methods should be complemented with the evaluation of the properties of the adapted version. The Spanish version of the PAQLQ maintains similar measurement properties to the original instrument and is reliable, valid and sensitive to clinical changes.