Assessment of Quality of Life in chronic pruritus: Relationship between the ItchyQoL and DLQI in 1150 patients

Stumpf A, Pfleiderer B, Fritz F, Osada N, Chen SC, Ständer S

Abstract

Chronic pruritus (CP) (1) is a bothersome symptom of many diseases (2), and can profoundly reduce quality of life (QoL) (3, 4). In order to evaluate the impact of reduction in QoL in patients with CP independently of their underlying disease, the ItchyQoL questionnaire was developed in 2008 by Desai et al. (5) and translated into German by Krause et al. (6) in 2013 (GerItchyQoL). ItchyQoL is a 22-item questionnaire containing 3 domains: symptoms, functions and emotions. The Dermatological Life Quality Index (DLQI) (7) is currently often used in dermatological patients in general (8), but also in patients with CP (9). ItchyQoL has been developed and validated for all types of CP, while DLQI appears to be valid only in conditions with visible lesions, such as dermatoses or excoriations. Despite the fact that many studies have used DLQI in CP and several studies have used ItchyQoL, the 2 instruments have never been compared. We hypothesized that ItchyQoL (in its German version) more specifically detects symptoms in patients with CP, while the detection of function and emotion might be more similar to DLQI. To examine this hypothesis, we analysed the responses of a large cohort of patients in whom both questionnaires have been applied.