Does having an asthmatic sibling affect the quality of life in children?

Chronic illness in a family member leads to deterioration of quality of life in other members of that family. We aimed to investigate the influence of having an asthmatic sibling on a child's quality of life (QoL). We enrolled 2-12 year aged healthy children with an asthmatic sibling in the study group and healthy children with a healthy sibling in the control group of this cross-sectional study. Sociodemographic characteristics of children and disease severity characteristics of asthmatic siblings were recorded. All parents filled in Turkish generic PedsQLTM short form appropriate for the child's age group. Study and control groups had 114 children each. Total PedsQLTM scores were not significantly different in any of the age groups (p=0.23, p=0.13, p=0.11 respectively). Emotional PedsQLTM sub-scores in children with an asthmatic sibling were significantly worse (83.0 +/- 16.5 vs 91.6 +/- 10.9 in the 2-4 year age group, 72.0 +/- 17.8 vs 92.2 +/- 11.6 in the 5-7 year age group, 73.7 +/- 24.1 vs 88.7 +/- 14.8 in the 8-12 year age group respectively, p=0.002 for all). Similarly, psychosocial sub-score was significantly lower in the 2-4 and 5-7-year-olds but not the 8-12 year old groups (p=0.01, p=0.01, p=0.08 respectively). In conclusion, healthy children with asthmatic siblings have significantly lower emotional QoL and this needs to investigated for other chronic diseases in further research.