Quality of life issues and new benchmarks in the assessment of skin diseases

With the enhanced awareness about the importance of conducting outcome research, it has become apparent to the dermatologists that it is important to develop a quality of life scale that is reliable, sensitive and validated. However, in venturing into this new field, it is important to recognize that there are issues relatively unique to the assessment of skin patients as compared to the assessment of other medical conditions, such as hypertension or cardiac disease. First, the traditional outcome measures used in most areas of medicine such as survival data or measurable changes in laboratory values, are most often not available to assess the outcome among dermatology patients because the threat of death is rare in dermatology practice and also many common skin conditions such as psoriasis or eczema do not have easily measurable laboratory data to document the status of the disease. On the other hand, patients with skin disorders can be greatly affected by disfigurement because the skin diseases are frequently visible to others and the patient’s quality of life may be devastated due to his or her body image or the reaction of others to his or her disfigurement. In other words, as we venture into this new field of assessing quality of life issues in skin disease patients, scientifically and quantitatively, understanding the underlying philosophical and conceptual issues involved is very important. This article encompasses these issues and advantages of quality of life assessment and the various questionnaires used for this purpose. In the end, a few studies conducted at King Edward Medical College, Lahore are presented.