Health care education, delivery, and qualityCharacteristics and medical resource use of asthmatic subjects with and without work-related asthma
Section snippets
Study design
A retrospective cross-sectional study of all the charts of subjects who were investigated for suspected WRA by means of specific inhalation challenge (SIC) tests between 2001 and 2004 was undertaken at Sacré-Coeur Hospital and Laval Hospital in the Canadian province of Quebec. The charts of asthmatic control subjects without WRA investigated during the same period were matched according to sex, age categories (younger or older than 45 years), and FEV1 categories (lower than 50% of predicted
Results
A total of 897 charts were reviewed. Five hundred thirteen subjects were investigated for WRA during a 3-year period. Three hundred fifty-one subjects had WRA: 145 had WEA, and 206 had OA. Three subjects who were given diagnoses of RADS were not included in the WRA or control groups, as mentioned in the definition section. One hundred sixty-two subjects did not have asthma at the time of the investigation. The repartition of the various diagnoses is shown in Fig 1.
Three hundred eighty-four
Discussion
This study showed that WRA is associated with a greater use of medical resources than NWRA. Indeed, subjects with WRA visited their physicians more frequently because of their asthma, went more frequently to the emergency department, and were more frequently hospitalized than asthmatic subjects without WRA for a similar level of airflow obstruction and airway responsiveness.
Our study is consistent with the findings from Breton et al,6 who reported that subjects with WRA were more likely to
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Supported by the Asthma in the Workplace Center, CIHR. Catherine Lemiere and Lucie Blais hold a scholarship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
Disclosure of potential conflict of interest: L.-P. Boulet has consulting arrangements with Altana, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and Merck Frosst and has received grant support and is on the speakers' bureau for 3M, Altana, Asthmatx, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim, Dynavax, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, IVAX, Merck Frosst, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Schering, and Topigen.