Cutoff Values of MASK-air Patient-Reported Outcome Measures

BACKGROUND: In clinical and epidemiological studies, cutoffs of patient-reported outcome measures can be used to classify patients into groups of statistical and clinical relevance. However, visual analog scale (VAS) cutoffs in MASK-air have not been tested. OBJECTIVE: To calculate cutoffs for VAS global, nasal, ocular, and asthma symptoms.METHODS: In a cross-sectional study design of all MASK-air participants, we compared (1) approaches based on the percen-tiles (tertiles or quartiles) of VAS distributions and (2) data -driven approaches based on clusters of data from 2 comparators (VAS work and VAS sleep). We then performed sensitivityanalyses for individual countries and for VAS levels corre-sponding to full allergy control. Finally, we tested the different approaches using MASK-air real-world cross-sectional and lon-gitudinal data to assess the most relevant cutoffs.RESULTS: We assessed 395,223 days from 23,201 MASK-air users with self-reported allergic rhinitis. The percentile-oriented approach resulted in lower cutoff values than the data-driven approach. We obtained consistent results in the data-driven approach. Following the latter, the proposed cutoff differenti-ating "controlled" and "partly-controlled" patients was similar to the cutoff value that had been arbitrarily used (20/100). However, a lower cutoff was obtained to differentiate between "partly-controlled" and "uncontrolled" patients (35 vs the arbitrarily-used value of 50/100).CONCLUSIONS: Using a data-driven approach, we were able to define cutoff values for MASK-air VASs on allergy and asthma symptoms. This may allow for a better classification of patients with rhinitis and asthma according to different levels of control, supporting improved disease management. (c) 2022 American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (J Allergy Clin Immunol Pract 2023;11:1281-9)