Agreement between Written and Video Asthma Symptoms Questionnaires in School Children in Urrnia, Iran

The prevalence of ast hma remains difficult to determine with precision with no abso luteor go ld stand ard for diagnosis, in tern ational study of asth ma and allergies in childhood(isaac) developed video qu estionn aire for ep idemiological stu dies with less relianc e onunderstanding written asthma questio nn aire, t he aim of this researc h was to determine theagreement between the isaac wri tten and video qu est ionnaires (avq3,0) o n respir ato rysymptoms and reported asthma,we studied 3000 ch ildren aged 13-14 year s in urmia, iran wh o completed sequentially theisaac written and video questio nnaires (avq 3.0) at scho ol. t he agreement be tweenresp onses to the two qu estionn aires for reported wheeze ever, cu rrent wheeze, whee ze onexercise, and nocturnal wheeze (the latter three qu estions relating to symptoms in theprevi o us 12 mo n ths), and to any co mbi nation of the latter three questi ons was examined byusing co ncordance and kap pa coefficien ts as measures o f agreement.the pr evalen ce o f wheeze eve r, curr ent wheeze, wheeze on exercise, and nocturn alwheeze were significan tly lower based on resp ons es to the video questio nn aire compared tothe written questionnaire. altho ugh concordance between video and written questionnaireswas high (75% to 93(10) for rela ted qu estions, agreement measured by the kappa sta tistic foreach question was only poor i.e. 0.22, 0.21,0, 13 for resting wheeze, exercise induced wheeze,an d noc turn al wheeze respectively.we conclu de that th e video questionnaire yields lower reported prevalenc e rates forasthma symptoms, and that there is poor agreement between resp on ses to the twoquestionna ires in irania n childre n.