2022 Volume 36 Issue 1 Pages 35-40
Currently, there are no effective treatments for food allergies that are guaranteed to be safe. In cases with history of anaphylaxis, there is anxiety that symptoms will appear, intake is not progressing, and social life is restricted. For children with severe food allergies and their caregivers, it is effective to conduct programs that aim to maintain quality of life (QOL) (allergy classes, summer camps), but a questionnaire to measure QOL has not been developed in Japan. Therefore, a disease-specific QOL questionnaire for children with food allergies can be used to evaluate children with food allergies and when their condition changes, compare between treatment groups, and establish programs aimed at maintaining QOL. We have started to develop scales for children that the child responds to, for children that the caregiver responds to and for the caregiver himself.
In the field of pediatric allergy, there are few QOL questionnaires developed in Japan that can be used to determine the therapeutic efficacy, so there are situations where the judgment from the patient's point of view is vulnerable. Developing a questionnaire for determining the patient's QOL by the medical staff who practice the medical treatment will lead to the tailor-made food allergy treatment selected by the patient.
