Dermatitis

Scalpdex: A Quality of Life Instrument for Scalp Dermatitis

Application

A quantitative measure of disease burden in scalp dermatitis patients.
Scalpdex can be used to measure a patient's response to a therapy.
The instrument may be useful as a secondary or coprimary end point for clinical trials.

Technical Summary

Scalp dermatitis is predominantly caused by two common inflammatory dermatoses: psoriasis and seborrheic dermatitis. Psoriasis affects approximately 2% of the general population, of which 50% to 90% have scalp involvement. Seborrheic dermatitis affects 1% to 3% of the general population, and up to 95% of these patients have involvement of the scalp.

Patients with scalp dermatitis routinely ask physicians for help, and pharmaceutical companies constantly develop new products to control the disease. An instrument that can measure and quantify scalp dermatitis' related quality of life would be helpful for both physicians and pharmaceutical companies, especially since studies have demonstrated that most physicians underestimate the impact of disease on quality of life and that objective clinical variables of skin disease are often poorly correlated with impact on quality of life Although a generic instrument is valuable to compare quality of life among different diseases, a disease-specific instrument is more sensitive to quality-of-life issues relevant to the disease in question. A disease-specific instrument may also be more sensitive to changes over time.

Dr. Chen and her colleagues have developed a scalp dermatitis' ecific instrument, Scalpdex, based on constructs that patients specifically mentioned in directed focus sessions and tested the measurement properties of the instrument in a sample of patients with scalp dermatitis. The instrument is based on previous work with Skindex, a tool which measures the effects of skin diseases of all types on patient quality of life.