Quality of life in some dermatological diseases

Quality of life in patients is becoming one of the aims of dermatological treatment and at the same time serves as a criterion of a treatment’s

efficiency. Quality of life is a multi-layer, dynamic – and most importantly – a subjective concept, including both general quality

of life (QoL) and health related quality of life (HRQoL). HRQoL indicates how a disease and its treatment influence the level of satisfaction

in various areas of a patient’s life. Since deteriorating HRQoL can retrospectively aggravate the patient’s mental state and his/her

skin disorders, interdisciplinary cooperation between a dermatologist and a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist is often desirable. The

creation of specific personality or psychopathological structures by individual dermatoses has not been proved and thus no specific

level or type of the quality of life has been detected. The level of HRQoL does not in all probability depend on the type of skin disease,

but rather on its seriousness, forms of treatment, psychological and social consequences, ego defensiveness mechanisms and on the

patient’s frustration tolerance. To determine the level of HRQoL in individual skin diseases, standardized special questionnaires can be

used. They are essential in research, but in clinical practice their results should be verified by a clinical interview, which may in itself be

sufficient in many cases.

Keywords: quality of life, QoL, HRQoL, psychodermatology