The Effect of Self-care Education on knowledge and Attitude in Patients with Asthma: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Asthma is one of the most common chronic respiratory diseases and one of the major problems in health systems in many societies around the world including Iran. Self-care is one of the most important factors in raising the awareness and attitude of individuals. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of self-care education on knowledge and attitude of patients with asthma.

In this quasi-experimental study, 104 patients with asthma were selected by available sampling method and randomly divided into two groups (n=52) and control (n=52). Both groups filled the questionnaire of awareness and attitude before the intervention. The self-care group was trained in four sessions of 60 minutes. The questionnaire was filled again this time by both groups, 8 weeks after the intervention.  and the data was analyzed using SPSS 16, descriptive statistics, independent t-test and paired t-test at 95% confidence interval.

The results showed that there was no significant difference between the mean and standard deviation of knowledge and attitude scores before and after self-care education (P> 0.05). There was a statistically significant difference between the mean and standard deviation of the knowledge and attitude of the experimental and control groups after the training (P<0.05). The results showed that the knowledge and attitude of the experimental group significantly improved after the intervention. 

The results of this study showed that self-care education is effective on knowledge and attitude in asthmatic patients. Therefore, considering the high prevalence of this disease and its economic and social burden, self-care education is recommended to improve the knowledge and attitude of asthmatic patients.