1 Department of Medicine, The Children's Hospital, Department of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, Boston
2 Department of Biostatistics, Harvard Medical School, Boston
3 Department of Medicine, Division of Allergy, The Children's Hospital, Boston
To the Editor.
In a recent article, Rachelefsky et al (Pediatrics 1986;78:1133-1138) described behavioral abnormalities and poor school performance due to oral theophylline preparations in children with asthma. There were a number of methodologic and reporting issues that we believe should be elucidated by the authors.
First, Table 4, which contains the only positive findings in the study, does not make sense. The legend says that the scores in this table are a sum of 53 items, each of which were scored as 1, 2, or 3.