Objective: Asthma disproportionately impacts youth who have been systemically marginalized and underserved, henceforth termed underserved for brevity. Disparities are driven by systemic and structural racism and social determinants of health. We aimed to synthesize findings from interventions delivered among youth who have been underserved, highlight effective intervention strategies, and provide recommendations to promote health equity. To demonstrate, we also present a case example of clinical application.
Methods: We conducted a systematic literature search of randomized trials among youth (≤18 years old) who are often underserved, delivered in clinical, community, or home-based settings with medication adherence and/or self-management behaviors as an intervention outcome. We used descriptive statistics to synthesize study characteristics and outcomes.
Results: Twenty four articles, representing 21 unique interventions, met inclusion criteria. Forty-six percent reported significant improvements in adherence or self-management for the intervention group. Self-management interventions focused on symptom recognition and monitoring demonstrated the greatest percentage of significant intervention findings (71.4%); controller medication adherence interventions demonstrated the fewest (33.3%).
Conclusions: Interventions are not consistently effective for youth who have been underserved. Findings suggest that pediatric psychologists can help patients from underserved backgrounds by bolstering symptom recognition and monitoring skills, providing self-management skill education, and problem-solving ways to reduce triggers through individually tailored, multicomponent approaches. Pediatric psychologists should simultaneously strive to consider and address systemic, structural, and social determinants of asthma disparities in their work.
Keywords: adherence; asthma; self-management.