In recent years there has been growing interest in secondary prevention strategies for the management of AE, and prevention of flares has been advocated as a useful outcome measure in this context. The concept of AE flares is one way of capturing disease chronicity, and may be a useful outcome for long-term, comparative effectiveness trials. For chronic conditions, assessment of disease control over time in clinical studies can be particularly challenging. In this regard it is similar to many chronic inflammatory conditions such as asthma or rheumatoid arthritis, where disease flare may be captured by escalation of treatment or symptoms.
FLARE DEFINITION SKIN
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Ītopic eczema (AE) is a chronic relapsing skin condition that is characterised by periods of disease flare, followed by periods of relatively well-controlled disease. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health.
FLARE DEFINITION TRIAL
Requests for access to the data should be made to Professor Kim Thomas This study uses data that was first collected in a national trial funded by the National Institute for Health Research, Health Technology Assessment (NIHR HTA) Programme, project number HTA 05/16 ( ), and through a study funded through an NIHR Clinician Scientist Fellowship awarded to Doctor Langan, grant number: NIHR/CS/010/014. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedĭata Availability: Data included in this manuscript is not able to be included in a public repository due to ethical restrictions. Received: NovemAccepted: MaPublished: April 21, 2015Ĭopyright: © 2015 Thomas et al.
PLoS ONE 10(4):Īcademic Editor: Jian-Xin Gao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, CHINA (2015) Validation of Treatment Escalation as a Definition of Atopic Eczema Flares. Citation: Thomas KS, Stuart B, O’Leary CJ, Schmitt J, Paul C, Williams HC, et al.