A half doubling dose change in bronchial hyperresponsiveness in a population represents an important difference

BACKGROUND: The prevalence of asthma has increased over recent decades and the reasons for this are poorly understood. A sensitive tool that can evaluate potential risk factors for asthma is bronchial hyperresponsiveness (BHR), a key physiological characteristic of asthma. However, although the minimum clinically important difference in BHR for an individual is accepted to be around one doubling dose, the minimum important change in a population is not defined. As with surrogate measures of cardiovascular disease risk such as blood pressure and cholesterol, a change that is not clinically important in an individual may be extremely important in public health terms. FINDINGS: To assess the potential impact of a small absolute change in BHR across a population, we modelled the effect of different changes in BHR on the prevalence rates of moderate and severe BHR in an asthmatic population. We calculate that a one half doubling dose increase in BHR increases the prevalence of moderate and severe BHR by 30%. If this was accompanied by an equivalent increase in the population prevalence of moderate and severe asthma, this would be highly significant in public health terms. CONCLUSIONS: We propose that a one half doubling dose worsening in BHR across a population may represent an important change. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2213-0802-1-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.