Observations and Results
A total of 246 pairs of children diagnosed with Asthma and/or AR and their caregivers attending the Pediatric Allergy and Asthma clinic during the study duration were included. The recruited children were in the age group ranging from 7-18 years of age with the mean ± SD of age being (10.84 ± 3.78) years. Approximately 70% of subjects were in 7-12 years age group whereas only 30 % were adolescents. Among the studied patients,149 (60.6%) were boys in contrast to 97 girls (39.4%).
Out of the 246 children, 20 (8%) were suffering from AR and 66 (27%) from Asthma alone respectively whereas two-third i.e. 120 (65%) had both AR and asthma. The study showed that 140 (56.9%) children had mild symptoms and 106 (43.1%) children had moderate to severe symptoms with male preponderance seen in both groups. Majority of the patients had persistent symptoms (191- 77.6%) with only 55 (22.4%) children being affected intermittently.
Only 129 (52.4%) caregivers fulfilled criteria to be primary caregivers. Majority of the caregivers were educated and approximately 96% had attained a graduate degree. There was no significant difference seen on comparison of the severity or chronicity of disease AR/Asthma and education status of the caregiver. (p = 0.422).
Emotional domain and activity limitation in children did not validate a statistically significant difference in QOL in various grades of AR/Asthma (p=0.496) (p=0.918) and (p=0.384), (p=0.561) respectively. There was no significant correlation between the severity of asthma and caregiver emotional disturbance (p=0.594). There was also no significant relationship between asthma severity and caregiver activity limitation (p=0.446) [Table I]