Assessing Psoriasis Severity and Outcomes for Clinical Trials and Routine Clinical Practice

The reliability of three psoriasis assessment tools: Psoriasis area and severity index, body surface area and physician global assessment

“…Although the original publication 7 is used as the standard reference source, it is not desquamation (the shedding of skin scales) but scale thickness that is generally scored. 11 Scaling is a very unstable sign; applications of topical treatment and emollients have an influence on it. This was eliminated in the present study, because patients were asked not to apply any topical treatment prior to the examination.…”

Treat-to-target and Improving Outcomes in Psoriasis: A Report from the GRAPPA 2014 Annual Meeting

“…Several such measures exist 23,24 , but each has important limitations to consider. The panelists discussed characteristics of ideal disease activity measures, including ready incorporation into the clinical setting (i.e., easy and quick measurements), accountability for both overall extent of involvement and the component characteristics of psoriatic lesions, applicability to different psoriasis types, and utility as both a single static measure and a measure of change over time.…”

First review on psoriasis severity risk stratification: An engineering perspective

“…The symptoms of melanoma include unusual sores, lumps, blemishes, markings or look and feel of the skin lesions, whereas, in psoriasis the symptoms are skin plaques, silver scales, nail pitting and arthritis. Further, one of the key differences in terms of time of cure of these: melanoma can be cured in early stages of the disease, while psoriasis is a lifelong condition [18,30]. Because of the nature of differences in tissue characteristics, the risk stratification needs special feature extraction and selection paradigms.…”

“…These six psoriasis severity scores were analyzed in [17] and concluded that PASI score is the most extensively studied psoriasis clinical severity score and most thoroughly validated by clinicians as well as researchers. Further, Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) is accepted as a gold standard [17][18][19][20][21] because it offers following advantages [20]: (i) it facilitates easy score; (ii) it helps in monitoring psoriasis disease and its clinical assessment; (iii) it provides a competitive score against other objective measurements; (iv) it is well established measure and standardized in daily practice; (v) offers strong repeatability (o 72%). Even though PASI has strong advantages, it has some challenges and we can categorize them in the list of the following disadvantages [20]: (i) there is no quantitative association between psoriasis and quality of life; (ii) PASI score does not take patient's feeling into consideration; (iii) it suffers from inter-observer variability in surface area calculation; (iv) no linear relationship between PASI score and severity in the range of PASI score from 35 to 72, thus the scale has redundancy; (v) PASI is not by organ or physical locations of the body such as: genitals, palms, nails.…”