A pilot quality-of-life instrument for pruritus.

Objective: We sought to develop a validated, reliable pruritus-specific quality-of-life (QOL) instrument, ItchyQoL.

Methods: From 21 in-depth interviews with patients with pruritus, we developed 22 pruritus-specific items, and hypothesized 3 major constructs that explain the way pruritus affects patients' QOL: symptoms, functional limitations, and emotions. We developed two versions of the pruritus QOL instrument, which assess for level of bother or frequency using items from the interviews and from generic skin QOL instruments, Skindex-16 (bother) and Skindex-29 (frequency).

Ultrasound as an outcome measure to assess disease activity in disorders of skin thickening: an example of the use of radiologic techniques to assess skin disease.

Good outcome measures are required to determine whether a therapy is effective, both in routine clinical practice and in experimental clinical trials. In disorders of skin thickening such as morphea and scleroderma, more commonly used outcome measures that use a subjective score based on palpated skin thickening are fraught with error. By contrast, measurements made by ultrasound have great promise as outcome measures that are quantitative, valid, reproducible, and responsive.

Imaging for suspected appendicitis: negative appendectomy and perforation rates.

Purpose: To determine which patients suspected of having acute appendicitis benefit from preoperative imaging.

Materials And Methods: The medical records of 462 consecutive patients who underwent appendectomy for clinically suspected acute appendicitis and underwent preoperative evaluation at our institution were retrospectively reviewed. Patients were divided into four groups: women (n = 166), girls (n = 46), men (n = 178), and boys (n = 72).