The Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) and other
asthma management guidelines based on the GINA
guidelines have promoted remarkable improvement
in asthma management. 1-3 These guidelines, including the 2006 GINA guidelines (GINA 2006), require
the clinician to achieve current control of asthma and
decrease the risk for future asthma exacerbation
rather than merely evaluate the severity of asthma. 4,5
Therefore, it is extremely important to evaluate
asthma control in each patient in order to use these
guidelines appropriately, and the GINA guidelines
provide the criteria for such e valuations.
The Asthma Control Test (ACT), which was developed in 2004, is a simple, self-administrated, and rap-idly completed assessment tool comprising 5 questions. 12 This tool is recognized as better for achieving
asthma control 13-15 despite requiring no lung function
tests. Several studies have shown that the ACT can
be an excellent predictor of asthma control as defined
by the G INA guidelines. 16-19 Although the Japanese
version of the ACT ( ACTJ) was introduced in 2006,
no similar analysis of the ACTJ has yet been per-formed.
In 1998, the Niigata Asthma Treatment Study
Group began conducting annual or biennial surveys
to investigate various asthma control and management problems. 20-28 We analyzed data from the
questionnaire based 2008 survey and reported that
the ACTJ is both reliable and valid.29 In order toallow e valuation of the ACTJ as a predictor of GINA
2006-defined asthma control in actual clinical practice, the questions in the 2010 survey concerning the
criteria for asthma control were based on the GINA
2006 guidelines. Therefore, the present study used
data from the 2010 questionnaire-based cross sectional survey to compare the ACTJ score and
GINA classification of asthma control and analyze the
usefulness of the ACTJ as a predictor of GINA 2006-defined asthma control.