Clinical tool demonstrates validity in assessments for COPD, asthma, type 2 diabetes

Key takeaways:

• The Assessment of Burden of Chronic Condition tool was developed to facilitate shared decision-making.
• The tool was effective in distinguishing groups of patients with different chronic conditions.

A recent study in Annals of Family Medicine confirmed the validity and reliability of a clinical tool in assessing burdens of COPD, type 2 diabetes and asthma.

“Effective disease management is essential in care for people with chronic conditions,” Danny Claessens, PhD, of the department of family medicine at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and colleagues wrote. “A key element in disease management is self-management, which starts with a patient’s insight into their experience with the burden of disease.”

The researchers wrote that most questionnaires fail to confirm the extent of burdens since they only focus on quality of life. The Assessment of Burden of Chronic Condition (ABCC) tool has emerged as a viable resource for supporting clinical decision-making, capturing the full scope of disease burdens and combining factors of both generic and disease-specific questionnaires.

“However, assessing the psychometric properties of the ABCC scale is a necessary element before bringing the ABCC tool to clinical practice,” they wrote.

Thus, Claessens and colleagues performed a cross-sectional questionnaire study comparing the ABCC scale with the Saint George Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ), Standardized Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (AQLQ-S) and Audit of Diabetes Dependent Quality of Life Questionnaire (ADDQoL19) to determine its validity and reliability.

The study cohort consisted of 187 patients in the Netherlands. Of those, 65 had COPD, 62 had asthma and 60 had type 2 diabetes.

The researchers found that the ABCC tool exceeded the threshold for validity in 75% of comparisons with the SGRQ, 100% of comparisons with the AQLQ-S questionnaire, and 75% of comparisons of the ADDQoL19.

Claessens and colleagues highlighted several findings that additionally supported the tool’s’ efficiency in patients with chronic conditions, with it:

• distinguishing groups of patients with COPD, asthma and type 2 diabetes;
• demonstrating consistency with total score and multi-item domains; and
• demonstrating optimal test-retest reliability, with intraclass correlation coefficient scores of 0.95, 0.93 and 0.95 for COPD, asthma and type 2 diabetes, respectively.

They added that the ABCC tool mostly utilizes single-item domains as opposed to multi-item domains carried by other questionnaires, which means “that it is suited for brief and efficient clinical application, where more robust questionnaires are too time consuming.”

Moving forward, “to test the effectiveness of the ABCC tool and evaluate user experiences when employing the tool in clinical practice, further research should be performed,” the researchers concluded.