ORIGINAL ARTICLE

PREVALENCE OF BRONCHIAL ASTHMA AMONG EGYPTIAN SCHOOL CHILDREN

By
Magdy Zedan,¹ Ahmed Settin,² Mohamed Farag,³ Mohamed Ezz-Elregal,⁴ Engy Osman,⁴, Ashraf Fouda^4
1Head of Allergy and Respiratory Medicine Unit, ²Genetic Unit, ³Department of Epidemiology and Community Medicine, ⁴Department of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt.

Correspondence to: Magdy Zedan, Email: magdyzedan@mans.edu.eg

Background: Prevalence rate of childhood asthma in urban and rural areas of the Nile Delta region of Egypt need to be determined. This should be based on accurate wordings describing asthma symptoms in questionnaire based surveys.

Aims: a) Determination of the prevalence of asthma among Egyptian children in the Nile Delta region of Egypt. b) Determination of the common Egyptian Arabic wordings actually used to describe asthma symptoms corresponding to wheeze, dyspnea, chest tightness and shortness of the breath.

Subjects and Methods: This is a two-stage study: 1) Determination of the prevalence of asthma through applying a validated questionnaire based on the ISAAC questionnaire and modified according to validated Arabic Egyptian wordings. This was applied on 3410 children (2515 from urban and 895 from rural regions).
2) Validation of Arabic wordings used for description of asthma symptoms. Fifty asthmatic children described their asthma symptoms in Arabic. The children then answered an Arabic translation of the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) video questionnaire having been shown the attack scenes. The response of asthmatic children was compared to that of 110 healthy children after watching the same clip.

Results: Of the 2720 positively responding subjects, 209 fitted the diagnosis of asthma with an overall prevalence of 7.7% (8% in urban and 7% in rural areas). Significant association was found with positive family history of allergy and bad housing conditions (p <0.01, OR=4.78 and 5.16 respectively) but not with passive smoking.

Conclusion: We found that the prevalence of asthma among school children in the Nile Delta region was 7.7%. A positive family history of allergy and bad housing conditions were found as risk factors for asthma. There was disparity of used terminologies in describing wheeze and chest tightness among Egyptian asthmatics and controls. This makes addition of local language terms of these symptoms to international guidelines is a logic approach with potential impact on asthma diagnosis and treatment.

Keywords: Prevalence of asthma, Asthma symptoms, Egyptian children.                                                 
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