HEALTH-RELATED QUALITY OF LIFE: Personal perception of health is proposed as an innovating assessment alternative for making medical and therapeutic choices on an individual and population basis. Standardized questionnaires have been developed to assess health-related quality of life (HRQL). ASSESSMENT OF HRQL IN ADOLESCENTS AND CHILDREN: Several approaches have been used. Some questionnaires assess health status in specific diseases or populations. More general instruments developed for the general population are useful for comparing between programs involving different diseases.
Practical applications: We present here the criteria of quality required for HRQL instruments and examine the difficulties encountered when applying these instruments to children and adolescents. We reviewed the main general instruments in the literature as well as those specifically designed for asthmatic children. None of the self-administered questionnaires available in France are fully satisfactory for children or adolescents in terms of robustness, sensitivity and discriminative power. The French versions of the Childhood Asthma Questionnaire developed in Great Britain and the Paediatric Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire developed in Canada were tested in a transcultural validation scheme.