Validity of a French Version of the Severe Asthma Questionnaire

"Difficult to treat asthma affects about 17% of the asthma population, among which 5% have severe asthma.

For these patients, the disease is often a burden to their professional, family and personal life, significantly altering their quality of life.

Current recommendations on medical management aim at asthma control and reduction of exacerbations. While there are now biologics that effectively address these objectives, they are still struggling to demonstrate their effectiveness in term of quality of life improvement.

Although in real life, patients well responding to biologics often report ""a changing life"", this is not well demonstrated in clinical trials, which only bring out modest variations in quality of life (mainly AQLQ) and asthma control scores. This may be due to the fact that currently used scores, measure either the quality of life in a generic way, or asthma control (dyspnea, use of rescue treatments) rather than asthma specific quality of life, and do not take into account the burden of oral steroids.

For this specific population of asthmatics, even the dedicated scores (11 scales in the adult population and 6 in the pediatric population) have trouble measuring variations in quality of life. They hardly ever manage to demonstrate a difference in quality of life between mild asthma and severe asthma.

However, just like oral steroids sparing, improving quality of life is of concern for physicians.

The development of Patient Reported Outcome (PRO) instruments follows rigorous scientific methodology. The Severe Asthma Questionnaire (SAQ) is a specific instrument for measuring quality of life in severe asthma. It was developed and validated in English by the University of Plymouth in 2018, according to the current recommendations, in an attempt to respond to the lack of specificity of the former quality of life tests.

It has gone through forward and backward translation process into French thanks to the Mappy Trust organization. It seems important to validate, in its French translation, the psychometric properties of the SAQ questionnaire, a specific instrument measuring quality of life for severe asthmatics.

Practical considerations:

• Useful data cf primary and secondary objectives will be collected at the first and the 6th month.
• Standard Operating Procedures: Patient recruitment will only take place in Bichat Hospital. Questionnaires and forms will be lend to the severe asthmatics coming to consultation and day hospital thanks to clinical research associate. Data will be anonymized and collected by a clinical research associate (fulfilled forms and questionnaire and medical file). Data management, data analysis will be ensured by Clinical Research Unit of Bichat Hospital.
• Sample size assessment : estimated on FALISSARD assumption: 320 patients.
• Plan for missing data: usual way for each quality of life questionnaire, enlarged 6th month visit period to collect 6th month reevaluation.
• Statistical analysis plan: cf section primary and secondary objectives.
• Quality assurance plan: Data validation and registry procedures, including any plans for site monitoring and auditing will be ensured by the Clinical Research Unit of Bichat Hospital.
• Data checks: Predefined rules for range will be pre-configure in the eCase Report Form (CRF) computed in REDCap. The data dictionary that contains detailed descriptions of each variable used by the registry (cf inclusion/exclusion criteria, primary and secondary outcome), including the source of the variable, and normal ranges is described in a specific document based on which the eCRF will be built. "