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JACI Highlights - June 2009Visual analog scale -- a useful tool in assessing improvement in allergic rhinitis during treatmentA simple test to evaluate globally the efficacy of treatment in rhinitis is of interest in practice. In the June 2009 issue of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Bousquet et al., in a randomized, multicenter, open-label parallel study involving 586 subjects with allergic rhinitis due to grass pollen and seen in specialist care, compared the responsiveness of visual analog scale (VAS) levels between baseline and treatment with the 2 gold-standard outcomes (symptom score and quality of life). Receiver operative characteristic curves and cost functions were used to assess visual analog scale cutoff levels and to distinguish between patients with no clinical improvement and patients with improvement of symptoms and/or quality of life. The optimal cutoff in VAS change separating the patients without improvement from those with improvement was 0.30 cm. Using the cost functions, a difference of more than 1 cm was significant. Moreover, when patients with an improvement in both symptoms and quality of life, the median improvement of VAS was 7 cm. The authors conclude that a VAS, when used for a global evaluation of rhinitis, was highly responsive to change during the treatment of allergic rhinitis and has the potential to be used in clinical practice to assess treatment response. "Change in visual analogue scale in a pragmatic randomized cluster trial of allergic rhinitis” by Bousquet et al. (JACI June 2009 Volume 123 No. 6)
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