Shared Decision Making and Health-Related Quality of Life in Atopic Dermatitis and Chronic Urticaria

Shared decision-making (SDM) between patients and healthcare professionals is a patient-centered approach that integrates clinical evidence with patient values and preferences to arrive at healthcare decisions. The major components of shared decision making include seeking the patient's participation and forming a partnership, helping the patient explore and compare treatment options, learning about the patient and their preferences, creating choice awareness, and jointly making and evaluating management decisions. Goals of treatment for chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) and atopic dermatitis (AD) are to decrease inflammation in the skin for AD and raised welts/angioedema for CSU, reduce itching and scratching, restore the skin barrier, minimize sleep disturbance, and improve health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Given the growing number of therapeutic options for patients with AD and CSU, shared decision-making has become increasingly important for selecting the best treatment option for each patient and family, in consideration of their unique values, preferences, risk-benefit analysis and outcome priorities, including the impact of treatment on health-related HRQOL. Here, we provide an overview of SDM and HRQoL in patients with chronic spontaneous, chronic inducible urticaria and atopic dermatitis.