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There are limitations with regard to the questionnaire data. The questionnaire was developed
as one of convenience and piloted on ten families in the paediatric general respiratory and
asthma clinics to ensure that it was easy to understand and easy to fill out. Two modifications
were made as a result of this - the description of wheeze was added, and the words for
describing amount of cough were changed. Park Walk School is an English-speaking school
but did have families of many nationalities so English was not necessarily the first language
of all the parents who were filling out the questionnaires and signing the consent form. The
questionnaire did not go through a validation process, save our own initial pilot. We did not
interact with the parents of the children directly. The questionnaires were distributed by the
teachers through the two classrooms and returned to the teacher from those happy to
participate. We did not have any data on the children who were given the questionnaire and
did not return it or did not gain consent for the study. I therefore cannot compare the
demographics of those who participated and those who did not to see if there were any major
differences between them. Forty-six children attended the hospital for the study from a
possible fifty-six in two classes. The classes were not stable through the study period with
additional movement of six children moving into and out of the classes because of moving
within the school and or two children from one family leaving the school altogether. Two
children that attended the hospital were ruled out because of inability to do lung function
successfully, although interestingly both were able to complete the exhaled NO tests. Five
children had asthma, four on bronchodilator therapy only and one on regular IHCS therapy
who briefly attended my asthma clinic -
these children were measured but not documented in
this segment of the study. The teachers ruled out seven children either because they had
special educational needs or because of misbehaviour - I do not know whether their families
had or had not consented. This gave us a response of 73Vo overall or 63Vo successful 'normal'
subject results.
The questionnaire responses were checked with the children on the day that they were brought
to the hospital to study. However it was obvious that the children were confident on some of
the responses and less confident on others. They tended to be confident on name, age,
nationality, current conditions such as asthma, hayfever or eczema, current medications, the
presence of family pets or presence of household smokers. They were less confident, and
there was more variability among the children about the degree of confidence, on answers
regarding recent 'colds', past history of conditions and family history of conditions, and for
these we had to rely predominantly on the written responses. We had documented nationality
but did not look at differences between them because of low numbers. The six nationalities
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