Assessing the Role of Large Language Models Between ChatGPT and DeepSeek in Asthma Education for Bilingual Individuals: Comparative Study

Abstract

Background: Asthma is a chronic inflammatory airway disease requiring long-term management. Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven tools such as large language models (LLMs) hold potential for enhancing patient education, especially for multilingual populations. However, comparative assessments of LLMs in disease-specific, bilingual health communication are limited.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate and compare the performance of two advanced LLMs-ChatGPT-4o (OpenAI) and DeepSeek-v3 (DeepSeek AI)-in providing bilingual (English and Chinese) education for patients with asthma, focusing on accuracy, completeness, clinical relevance, and language adaptability.

Methods: A total of 53 asthma-related questions were collected from real patient inquiries across 8 clinical domains. Each question was posed in both English and Chinese to ChatGPT-4o and DeepSeek-v3. Responses were evaluated using a 7D clinical quality framework (eg, completeness, consensus consistency, and reasoning ability) adapted from Google Health. Three respiratory clinicians performed blinded scoring evaluations. Descriptive statistics and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were applied to compare performance across domains and against theoretical maximums.

Results: Both models demonstrated high overall quality in generating bilingual educational content. DeepSeek-v3 outperformed ChatGPT-4o in completeness and currency, particularly in treatment-related knowledge and symptom interpretation. ChatGPT-4o showed advantages in clarity and accessibility. In English responses, ChatGPT achieved perfect scores across 5 domains, but scored lower in clinical features (mean 3.78, SD 0.16; P=.02), treatment (mean 3.90, SD 0.05; P=.03), and differential diagnosis (mean 3.83, SD 0.29; P=.08).

Conclusions: ChatGPT-4o and DeepSeek-v3 each offer distinct strengths for bilingual asthma education. While ChatGPT is more suitable for general health education due to its expressive clarity, DeepSeek provides more up-to-date and comprehensive clinical content. Both models can serve as effective supplementary tools for patient self-management but cannot replace professional medical advice. Future AI health care systems should enhance clinical reasoning, ensure guideline currency, and integrate human oversight to optimize safety and accuracy.

Keywords: patient education; ChatGPT; DeepSeek; asthma; cross-linguistic study.

Figure 1.. Response examples of the two large language models in Chinese and English language contexts.

Figure 2.. Performance heatmap across seven evaluation dimensions (1‐4 scale). CN: Chinese; EN: English.

Figure 3.. Quality assessment of ChatGPT’s responses to asthma-related questions across 8 domains in the English language environment. *P<.05; NS: not significant (P≥.05).