Assessing the Quality of Life in Pediatric Asthma Patients and Their Caregiver at Qassim Region, Saudi Arabia
Author(s): Abdullah Saleh Al-Nafeesah, Aisha Thwayb Almutairi, Abdullah Mohammed AlOlayan, Shouq Mohammed Al-Baqmi*, Razan Ghazi Almehmadi, Abeer Sulaiman Aldakhil, Abdullah Ali Alsuhaibani, Saleh Abdullah Alharbi, Ibrahim Abdullah Aljabr, Omar Abdullah Alhasson and Waqas Sami
Abstract
Due to the pathophysiology of asthma, it interrupts with the daily activities of the patients and affect the patients psychologically. Studies show that affected children with asthma and their parents have an altered quality of life, while such studies are not done in Qassim region. Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried among pediatric asthma patients and their caregivers. The participants are the asthmatic children at the age of 5 to 15 who visited the Respiratory Clinics and Emergency with their caregiver from January to March 2020. A sample size of 251 asthmatic children with caregivers was used. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used in the analysis. Results: There was a significant relationship between the caregiver gender and emotional disturbance (p=0.008) and activity limitation (p=0.000). There was no relation between the presence of another child with asthma and emotional disturbance (p =0.565) nor activity limitation (p=0.748). There was a significant relationship between asthma control status and the children symptoms (p=0.001), asthma treatment (p=0.007), worries (p=0.007) and communication (p=0.001) domains. Conclusion: Asthma control accounts a lot on the state of both the patient and the caregiver. Effective and timely control status measures is required to ensure low levels of anxiety with caregivers and reduced symptoms with the asthmatic children. This study recommends collaboration between doctors and caregivers, where doctors will be able to train the caregivers on how best to manage children with asthma.