OBJECTIVE To evaluate criteria for the diagnosis of asthma in an epidemiological survey. METHODS Adolescents (13-14 years of age) and legal guardians of schoolchildren (6-7 years of age) in the city of Santo André, Brazil, completed the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) standard written questionnaire. Affirmative responses regarding wheezing within the last 12 m...

One of the objectives of that study was to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of the annual prevalence of wheezing as an indicator of asthma. To do this the authors compared answers to two different questions: question 2 (Q2) of the core asthma module of the ISAAC questionnaire “Have you had wheezing in the past 12 months”? and question 6 (Q6) -“Have you ever had asthma?”. It has been previously ...

OBJECTIVE Before the use of the ISAAC (International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood) questionnaire in epidemiologic surveys, little could be told about the comparative occurrence of asthma in the world due to differences in employed methods. In Brazil, the ISAAC questionnaire has been used in some urban regions. In this study it was applied in both, urban and rural areas, in order t...

Phase One of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) has reported the prevalence of asthma, rhinitis and eczema symptoms in children. In 99 centres from 40 countries, a total of just under 317,000 13-14-yr-old children also completed a video questionnaire, showing the symptoms and signs of asthma. This first video sequence has been compared to the ISAAC written ques...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown that particulate matter is a major problem in indoor air quality in Hong Kong schools, but little has been done to assess its relationship with health indicators in the children attending those schools. Our study aims to address this research gap by collecting aerosol data in schools to examine the link between different air pollutants with childhood respi...

BACKGROUND Asthma and allergies are world-wide common chronic diseases among children and young people. Little information is available about the prevalence of these diseases in rural areas of Latin America. This study assesses the prevalence of symptoms of asthma and allergies among children in urban and rural areas at Oropeza Province in Bolivia. METHODS The Spanish version of the ISAAC sta...

The prevalence of allergic diseases in childhood has increased significantly over the last decades. This increase seems to be closely associated with the way of life of western societies. The high prevalence differences on different regions may be due to linguistic and cultural reasons and not to real variations in prevalence. This is the reason why several authors felt the need to perform an o...

A cross sectional survey of 3321 school going children (5-15 years) using modified ISAAC questionnaire in Jaipur city showed 7.59% children to have asthma (in last 12 months) and 8.4% wheezing in last 12 months. Only 5.3% children had physician diagnosed asthma ever suggesting under diagnoses.