Asthma Control Test: Is a Physician Referral Necessary?

Objective:The Asthma Control Test (ACT) is one of the most important tools used to assess the control of asthma patients.It is completed by the patient and allows clinicians to have an idea about asthma symptoms control for the last 4 weeks.In this study, it was aimed to determine whether there is a difference between the completion of the ACT by the patient himself/herself and the completion of the ACT under the supervision of a physician, and to determine the patient-related factors that may affect this difference, if any. Materials and Methods:Our single-center study was conducted with 100 patients over 18 years of age who had been receiving treatment for their asthma for at least 3 months according to GINA recommendations.The ACT was first completed by the patient and then completed by the same physician for each patient and the scores were compared.The effect of gender, education, and employment status of the patients on the differences were analyzed. Results:No significant difference was found between the physician-guided administration of the ACT and the self-administration of the ACT on total ACT scores [20 (17-23) vs. 21 (17-23); p=0.065].When the results of the self-administered ACT were compared with the results of the physician-administered ACT for each question, it was observed that there was a significant difference between the answers given to questions 2 and 4 [4 (3-5) vs. 4 (3-5); p=0.031); 4.5 (3-5) vs. 5 (4-5); p<0.001, respectively].It was observed that the scores given by female patients to the second question of the ACT were higher than the scores given to the physician-guided ACT (mean difference of 0.290.96 in women and -0.130.76 in men p=0.018). Conclusion:There may be differences between the application of ACT by the patient and the physician.Factors such as gender and educational status may affect the results.Especially in some questions, the physician should scrutinize the patient's responses and evaluate them together with the clinical findings.