Chest
Clinical Investigations: AsthmaComparison Between Peak Expiratory Flow Rates (PEFR) and FEV1 in the Monitoring of Asthmatic Subjects at an Outpatient Clinic
Section snippets
Subjects
Subjects were selected from a population of 303 patients who had been seen by two of us (J.L.M., A.C.) at least twice at the asthma outpatient clinic of the tertiary care Sacré-Coeur Hospital, over a 2-year period between 1990 and 1992, and for whom FEV1 and PEFR data had been collected. Entry criteria for the study group were as follows: (1) aged between 16 and 75 years; (2) a diagnosis of asthma according to American Thoracic Society (ATS) criteria;13 (3) FEV1 and PEFR measurements at each
Baseline Results
Detailed demographic, personal, and clinical characteristics are shown in Table 1. Our study population of 197 subjects had a higher proportion of women (58%) than men (42%). Very few subjects were current smokers at the time of the study. Most were atopic. Almost all of them had a diagnosis of asthma; only six (3.0%) subjects had asthma associated with chronic obstructive lung disease. Most subjects were using an inhaled β2-adrenergic agent together with an inhaled steroid, with or without
Discussion
The results of this study show that the percent change in FEV1 is more marked than the corresponding percent change in PEFR in asthmatic subjects being followed up at a respiratory outpatient clinic. The relationship between these two measurements was assessed using correlation coefficients, but since this method may be misleading,20 we also used agreement analysis and graphic techniques. As recently reviewed by Cross and Nelson,1 Lebowitz,2 and others,6, 7, 8 we found very good correlation
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the medical technologists of the Department of Chest Medicine of Sacré-Coeur Hospital for the administration and supervision of the lung function tests. We also thank Katherine Tallman for reviewing the manuscript.
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Dr. Gautrin is a research fellow with the Fonds de la Recherche en Sante du Quebec (Program 16.1) and with Boehringer-Ingelheim. Dr. Malo is a research fellow with the Fonds de la Recherche en Sante du Quebec and the Université de Montréal School of Medicine.