How is patient satisfaction with acne treatment measured?

Linked Article:   van Zuuren et al . Br J Dermatol 2021; 185 :36–51. Acne is a common skin disease that causes a lot of burden and distress. Acne can be treated with medication applied to the skin (e.g. creams) and with oral medication (e.g. tablets). It is important to know how satisfied people with acne actually are with their treatment. So this should be measured in studies that evaluate acne treatments. Ideally, all researchers should measure patient satisfaction with acne treatment in exactly the same way. Only then those studies and treatments can be compared. Our aim was to find out how researchers measured treatment satisfaction in acne, and if there were any methods that could be recommended. We, a team from the Netherlands and Canada, found 255 studies that mentioned satisfaction with acne treatment. Of these, there was only one study that described a method of how patients’ treatment satisfaction with acne medication could be measured. However, we judged that method not scientifically good enough to recommend. Sixty‐six studies appeared, after thorough examination, not to report treatment satisfaction or were published more than once. The remaining 188 studies did measure patient satisfaction: 91 studies on treatment of acne with medication and 97 on treating acne scars. Some used one question, some a questionnaire. There were many differences in how the questions could be answered and scored. This makes comparing studies on patient satisfaction with acne treatment very difficult. The conclusion of our study is that there is not yet a method that measures patients’ satisfaction with treatments in acne that is good enough to be used by all researchers. We recommend that such a method is developed and then used in all studies so that in the future the results of those studies on treatment satisfaction can be compared.