Childhood Asthma Control Test or c-ACT was translated in different languages. We propose to validate the Arabic Tunisian dialect version by checking both it's understood by patients and their parents and the conformity with the control criteria of international recommendations. Cross-sectional study was conducted in 51 asthmatic children, aged from 4 to 11 years, followed for at least 6 months. c-ACT was administrated before consultation. The level of asthma control was compared to that estimated by the expert based on GINA criteria with an evaluation period of 4 weeks. Understanding of this Arabic version has been confirmed with the patients and their parents.This version showed a satisfactory internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha equal to 0.853. The area under the ROC curve equal to 0.993 is highly significant (p <0.001). The c-ACT showed a significant discriminative ability of patients with different level of control of their asthma (p <0.001). The study of the performance of c-ACT 19 point threshold, to identify children uncontrolled, found a sensitivity of 73.7% and negative predictive value of 86.5%. Considering the 20 point threshold, sensitivity and negative predictive value reached respectively 94.7% and 96.9%. There is a highly significant correlation (p <0.001) between the level of control patients detected by the c-ACT and that estimated by the specialist with a kappa coefficient equal to 0.778. Most children have understood the Arabic version of the c-ACT.This study demonstrated a good correlation between the result of c-ACT in dialectal Arabic and clinical evaluation. the usefulness of this version will be evaluated after its release.

Ouali, H., et al. (2012). "Childhood asthma control test: Validation of the Arabic Tunisian dialect version in 51 patients." European Respiratory Journal 40.

http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/40/Suppl_56/P3970