Chest
Original ResearchMeasuring Disease-Specific Quality of Life in Obstructive Airway Disease*
: Validation of a Modified Version of the Airways Questionnaire 20
Section snippets
Overview
We tested our revised AQ20 (AQ20-R) among 352 adults in the United States with obstructive airway disease. We evaluated concurrent validity of the AQ20-R by assessing its cross-sectional relationship with health status, disease severity, lung function, and medication use. Among 278 of these subjects, we evaluated predictive validity of the AQ20-R in relation to health-care utilization ascertained 1 year later. Approval for this study was obtained from the Committee on Human Research at the
Performance of the Modified AQ20 Items
The AQ20-R demonstrated strong internal consistency with a standardized Cronbach α = 0.88. As shown in Figure 1, AQ20-R scores were skewed toward the milder end of the scale indicating better HRQL. This “ceiling effect” was most prominent among the chronic bronchitis group with 11 subjects (13%) scoring zero (the best possible score).
Among the seven modified items, “unable” was chosen as a response 39 times, with 21 subjects responding unable to at least one item and 7 subjects responding
Discussion
Our findings support the utility and validity of the AQ20-R across a range of airway conditions. The AQ20-R thus has the advantage of a disease-specific HRQL measure in that it assesses health effects relevant to the condition of interest, while at the same time not being overly focused on a single diagnostic category. This property of the AQ20-R makes it well suited for use in populations with mixed airway diseases or in groups in which diagnostic homogeneity cannot be ensured.
In this study,
Activity-Based Items of the AQ20 as Used in the AQ20-R With Modified Response Option
All occurrences of the term chest trouble in the original English version were substituted with breathing problems in our revised questionnaire. Modified response options for items mentioned are as follows: yes = 1, no = 0, unable = 1, not applicable = 0.
Item 3: Because of your breathing problems, do you feel breathless when gardening?
Item 4: Do you worry when going to a friend’s house that there might be something there that will set off an attack of breathing problems?
Item 10: Because of your
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2013, International Journal of Nursing StudiesCitation Excerpt :Other properties were not assessed (Table 5). The Airway Questionnaire AQ 20-R was studied in one study (Chen et al., 2006) in the community (Table 4). Validity (hypothesis testing) was rated fair for study quality and positive for measurement property (Table 3).
Reproduction of this article is prohibited without written permission from the American College of Chest Physicians (www.chestjournal.org/misc/reprints.shtml)
Financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health grant R01 HL607438 from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and from the Flight Attendants Medical Research Institute CoE2001. Dr. Chen was also supported by National Institutes of Health grant F32 HL077994.
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From the Cardiovascular Research Institute (Dr. Chen), Division of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (Drs. Blanc and Eisner), and Division of Rheumatology (Drs. Katz and Yelin), University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA.