Neville and Higgins in their review of the provision of asthma care in a recent issue of Thorax¹ refer to a meeting at the Royal College of Physicians in London at which agreement on the form of three key questions about patients' asthma symptoms was reached. The form of the questions was wrongly quoted in their paper and the correct form is:

"In the last week/month:

(1) Have you had difficulty sleeping because of your asthma symptoms (including cough)?

(2) Have you had your usual asthma symptoms during the day (cough, wheeze, chest tightness or breathlessness)?

(3) Has your asthma interfered with your usual activities (e.g. housework, work/school)?"

There is a trade off to be made between the better recall of events over the past week and the greater generalisability of events over the past month. The feeling of the meeting was that there was insufficient evidence upon which to . . . [Full text of this article]