“The complete impact of skin disease on patients represents a sum of disease impacts in multiple domains, including symptom, emotional, and functional impacts. These domains
define the patient’s illness experience, which can be different from what physicians perceive when they examine the skin. Consistently capturing and quantifying disease impact in individual patients in routine clinical dermatology practice are difficult. Measures of disease activity, when captured in dermatology practice, tend to focus on objective measures such as skin erythema and scale or body surface area involved. Skin symptom burden may not readily be observed by clinicians, resulting in underestimating skin disease burdens.”

“Overall, the HRQoL impact of increased itch showed strong correlations with patients being bothered mostly in the symptom domain, with significant but lesser effects in emotional and functional domains. However, despite increased itch burdens associated with age, HRQoL measures showed in the face of increased itch frequency and severity, older patients reported less emotional and functional HRQoL impact. A similar observation has been made in studies examining the impact of pain in elderly versus younger age cohorts where comparable pain levels resulted in less mental health impact in older patients. Older patients
with chronic medical conditions have higher levels of global affective well-being and lower levels of affective reactivity than younger adults, consistent with our observations.”

Li, Y., & Swerlick, R. A. (2024). Capture of Patient Itch Scores in Practice Reveals Disparate Itch Impact on the Basis of Age, Gender, and Race: A Cross-Sectional Survey Analysis. JID innovations : skin science from molecules to population health, 5(2), 100338.Free Full Text