Symptom Burden of Patients with Dry Eye Disease: A Four Domain Analysis

Joelle A Hallak, Sarmad Jassim, Vishakha Khanolkar and Sandeep Jain

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 12, 1-8

Abstract: Purpose: To determine which sensory (symptom persistence and intensity) and reactive (activity and affective interference) domains of symptom analysis are essential for assessing symptom burden in dry eye disease (DED) patients. Methods: A symptom domain tool was developed to investigate all four symptom domains in DED. In a cross-sectional pilot study, we administered the symptom burden tool and the Ocular Surface Disease Index (OSDI) questionnaire to 48 DED patients. Total and domain scores from the symptom burden tool and the OSDI were normalized to achieve comparability. Spearman correlation coefficients were calculated to measure the relationship between domains and subscales. Agreement between the symptom burden tool and OSDI was assessed by Bland-Altman plot. Assigned treatments were compared by symptom burden to determine whether treatment aggressiveness is linked to symptom intensity. Results: There was high agreement between the symptom burden tool and the OSDI. Symptom persistence had a stronger correlation with affective interference (r = 0.62 for the symptom burden tool and r = 0.73 for the OSDI) than activity interference (r = 0.58 for the symptom burden tool and r = 0.60 for the OSDI). Symptom intensity correlated weakly with affective interference (r = 0.38) and activity interference (r = 0.37) in the symptom burden tool (OSDI does not have a subscale for intensity). In patients with equal persistence of symptoms, those having high symptom intensity were receiving more aggressive treatment (66.7%) than those with lower symptom intensity (33.3%). Conclusions: Persistence of symptoms correlates better with affective interference than activity interference. Intensity of symptoms may be important for treatment decisions.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0082805 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 82805&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0082805

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0082805

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().