Quality of life and patients' satisfaction in chronic urticaria and respiratory allergy

BACKGROUND: Few articles are available about chronic urticaria (CU) impact on patients' quality of life (QoL). The aim of our study was to evaluate QoL in CU patients both focusing on health status and subjective satisfaction. We adopted two generic tools: SF-36 (an health status questionnaire) and SAT-P (a satisfaction profile). METHODS: Twenty-one untreated patients (five males, 16 females; aged 46.3 +/- 12.4) affected by CU, were enrolled. SF-36 and SAT-P scores of CU patients were compared with scores of a group of 27 patients with respiratory allergy. Published reference values of 608 and 241 Italian healthy subjects were used as controls, respectively, for SF-36 and SAT-P. RESULTS: Patients with CU compared with allergic patients referred significantly lower scores in physical functioning (P = 0.046), role physical (P = 0.01), bodily pain (P = 0.0001), general health (P = 0.0043) and role emotional (P = 0.04), and compared with reference sample reported lower scores in all SF-36 domains (P < 0.0001). SAT-P scores of CU patients compared with patients with respiratory allergy and with reference sample were significantly lower in many aspects of daily life. CONCLUSIONS: These results show a significant impact on health status and on subjective satisfaction in patients with CU: the symptoms affect everyday life, limiting and impairing physical and emotional functioning, and acts as an indirect burden on life satisfaction.