The Awareness of Asthma and COPD among Religious Officials

Aim: Religion has an important role for coping with various medical conditions and serious diseases. Chronic airway diseases such as asthma and COPD are associated with morbidity and mortality in our country. The aim of this study is to evaluate the awareness of COPD and asthma in religious officials.

Study Design: Retrospective study.

Place and Duration of Study: As a social responsibility project, religious officials working at Kocaeli city were invited to an educational seminar about chronic airway diseases.

Methodology: Before the seminar, participants who volunteered to join were asked to fulfill a self-administered questionnaire that includes questions about asthma and COPD. The data were analyzed retrospectively.

Results: There were 710 participants (193 (27.2%) female and 517 (72.8%) male) included the analysis. The importance of smoking in the development of COPD was known in 65.8% of the population. The role of smoking cessation in treatment (73.5%) and the role of spirometry in diagnosis (69.1%) were relatively well known. The awareness about prophylactic influenza vaccination in COPD was quite low. Totally 72.8% of the participants stated that asthma is not an infectious disease. Only 38% of the population was aware that asthma medications don’t have a risk of addiction. The information about preferred route of treatment in asthma was (95.4%) high.

Conclusion: This study suggested that awareness of asthma is higher than COPD in religious officials as similar to general population. Since people consider and respect about the opinion of religious officials in our country, we suggested that their awareness about asthma and COPD would contribute to patient education on chronic airway diseases.