Abstract
Many hospitalizations for asthma could potentially be avoided with appropriate management. The aim of this study was to analyze data on disease management of a paediatric population with a hospitalization for asthma. The study population comprised 6–17 year old subjects belonging to three local health units of the Lombardy Region, northern Italy. Regional administrative databases were used to collect data on: the number of children with an incident hospitalization for asthma during the 2004–2006 period, anti-asthma therapy, specialist visit referrals, and claims for spirometry, released in the 12 months before and after hospitalization. Each patient’s asthma management profile was compared with GINA guideline recommendations. Among the 183 hospitalized subjects, 101 (55%) received therapy before hospitalization and 82 (45%) did not. 10% did not receive any therapy either before or after hospital admission and in 13% the therapy was discontinued afterward. Based on GINA guidelines, asthma management adhered to recommendations only for 55% of subjects. Results may suggest that for half of hospitalized subjects, inaccurate diagnosis, under-treatment/scarce compliance with asthma guidelines by physicians, and/or scarce compliance to therapy by patients/their parents occurred. In all these cases, hospitalization would be a proxy indicator of preventable poor control of disease, rather than a proxy indicator of severity.
Citation: Bianchi M, Clavenna A, Sequi M, Bortolotti A, Fortino I, et al. (2013) Childhood Asthma Management Pre- and Post-Incident Asthma Hospitalization. PLoS ONE 8(10): e76439. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0076439
Editor: Imti Choonara, Nottingham University, United Kingdom
Received: May 15, 2013; Accepted: August 25, 2013; Published: October 18, 2013
Copyright: © 2013 Bianchi et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: This study has been funded in part by Regione Lombardia (Progetto Epidemiologia dei farmaci – EPIFARM). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. No additional external funding received for this study.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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