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Introduction: To date we have available specific instruments assessing health-related quality of life (HRQL) in rhinoconjunctivitis or in asthma, but not instruments evaluating rhinitis and asthma together, although they often coexist. The aim of our study was to develop and validate a specific quality of life (QoL) questionnaire for adult patients with rhinoconjunctivitis, asthma or both. Materials and methods: A pool of 42 items covering the main symptoms and problems related to respiratory allergy, was generated based on literature review and clinical experience. The items were randomly listed and presented to 148 consecutive outpatients 46 suffering from asthma (age 32.9 ± 14.3 years), 53 suffering from rhinoconjunctivitis (age 32.6 ± 11.5 years) and 49 from asthma and rhinoconjunctivitis (age 35.6 ± 12.2 years). The patients were asked to indicate which item they had directly experienced and for each of them, its importance on a four-point scale (1 = not important; 4 = very important). Twelve items were cancelled from the list, because of low importance or redundance. In the instrument validation phase, 104 patients (42 with rhinoconjunctivitis alone and 62 with asthma and rhinoconjunctivitis) were evaluated with the generic instrument SF-36 and the new questionnaire (RHINASTHMA). Results: RHINASTHMA was able to differentiate patients with rhinitis from those with both rhinitis and asthma. In stable condition, RHINASTHMA showed good reliability. The factor analysis extracted three factors with a good reliability (0.93, 0.87, 0.76). Discussion: RHINASTHMA is the first tool aimed at evaluating HRQL impairment in patients with rhinitis and/or asthma. It provides a short and simple assessment, and has overall psychometric properties. This is of relevance because of the frequent asthma–rhinitis comorbidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]