Effectiveness of Health-Promoting Lifestyle Education on Physical Symptoms and Illness Perception of Patients With Asthma

Having a health-promoting lifestyle can improves the course of asthma. This study aims to determine the effectiveness of health-promoting lifestyle education on physical symptoms and illness perception in patients with asthma.

This is a quasi-experimental study with a pre-test, post-test, and follow-up design that was conducted on 30 patients with asthma referred to Shahid Fayyazbakhsh Hospital in Tehran, Iran in 2020, who were selected by a purposive sampling method and randomly assigned to two groups of intervention (n=15) and control (n=15). The instruments were the Illness Perception Questionnaire and the St. George’s Respiratory Questionnaire. Th educational program was presented to the intervention group at 6 sessions, each for 90 minutes. The data were analyzed using chi-square test and repeated measures analysis of variance in SPSS v. 24 software.

The effect of group (η2=0.161, P=0.002), time (η2=0.720, P=0.001), and the interaction effect of time and group (η2=0.606, P=0.001) on physical symptoms, and the effect of group (η2=0.132, P=0.006), time (η2=0.760, P=0.001), and the interaction effect of time and group (η2=0.695, P=0.001) on illness perception were significant.

The health-promoting lifestyle education is effective in improving the symptoms and illness perception in patients with asthma. The officials and professionals in the health sector are recommended to provide behavioral interventions such as health-promoting lifestyle education for patients with asthma, in addition to medical treatments.