Teens with poorly controlled asthma welcome the opportunity to use the Internet and instant messaging to manage their disease, Dutch researchers report.

But adolescents whose asthma is already well controlled say they don’t feel the need for Web-based self-management, researcher Victor van der Meer of Leiden University Medical Center and colleagues found.

About 11 percent of adolescents worldwide have asthma, van der Meer and his team point out in the July issue of Chest. While self-management is the key for effective asthma control, they add, neither patients nor doctors are enthusiastic about written programs, and participation rates for such programs are low.

The investigators evaluated whether Internet-based tools, which are becoming increasingly popular for helping people manage chronic illness, would be acceptable and useful to teens with asthma.

Ninety-seven adolescents monitored their asthma for one month by checking their lung function every day and entering the data into a Web application or via short message service. Participants then received an instant message that rated their lung function as a percentage of expected or personal best values. The researchers then conducted several focus groups with 35 study participants to evaluate their perceptions of the system.

Nearly two thirds of the adolescents with poorly controlled asthma said that lack of belief in their ability to manage the disease was a major barrier to getting asthma under control, while just 17 percent of study participants with good asthma control felt that this was the case.

The study participants with well-controlled asthma said they thought it was “fun” to do the measurements, but not very useful. Eighty percent said they had no need for an individualized action plan for managing their asthma.

However, those with poorly controlled asthma felt that looking at their symptoms over time and being able to react to symptom changes was beneficial, and two thirds said it would be useful for them to develop an action plan.

All of the teens found the program easy to use. “Electronic monitoring and reporting was no burden at all and was easy to incorporate into the daily activities of adolescents,” the investigators write.

“Internet-based self-management appears to be a powerful tool . . . in this group of patients,” the researchers conclude. However, they add, these programs should be targeted to teens with poor asthma control, because they are the most likely to use them.

Source: Chest