Instrument Shows Promise for Measuring Psoriasis Treatment Satisfaction

A recently developed treatment satisfaction tool called the DermSat-7 was valid and reliable for use in psoriasis management and clinical trials.

Joseph F. Merola, MD, was among several presenters discussing psoriasis at the 2025 Hawaii Winter Clinical Dermatology meeting.

In research not associated with the meeting, Dr. Merola and colleagues found that a recently developed treatment satisfaction tool called the DermSat-7 was valid and reliable for use in clinical practice for patients with psoriasis.

“A critical need exists for developing a validated dermatologic-specific treatment satisfaction instrument,” the authors wrote in JAMA Dermatology.

Investigating the DermSat-7

The DermSat-7 was developed to assess patient satisfaction with dermatology treatments. To examine its validity in psoriasis, the researchers conducted a survey-based study at outpatient dermatology clinics at the University of Southern California, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Mount Sinai Union Square.

The study spanned July 2020 to April 2023 and included 142 English-speaking adults with psoriasis. The patients had an average age of 51.1 years (SD, 15.5), and just over half were male (54.2%; n=77).

At the start of the study, clinicians used the Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI), body surface area (BSA) and Physician Global Assessment (PGA) to evaluate psoriatic disease severity.

Meanwhile, patients completed the self-administered DermSat-7, the generic 9-item Treatment Satisfaction Questionnaire for Medication (TSQM-9), and the Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI), in addition to self-reporting their disease severity on the Patient Global Assessment (PtGA). The participants repeated the DermSat-7 and PtGA 2 weeks later so the researchers could assess test-retest reliability.

Key Findings

The researchers found that the DermSat-7 was a robust and reliable tool for measuring treatment satisfaction among patients with psoriasis. Key results included:

• Structural validity: Factor analyses confirmed that the DermSat-7 captures a single dimension, treatment satisfaction.
• Internal consistency: The effectiveness and convenience domains demonstrated high internal consistency, with Cronbach’s α values of 0.88 and 0.81, respectively.
• Construct validity: The researchers found strong to very strong correlations between the DermSat-7 and TSQM-9 subscores (ρ=0.75 for effectiveness, ρ=0.66 for convenience, and ρ=0.70 for overall satisfaction; all P<0.001). Differences in satisfaction scores aligned with variations in disease severity as measured by PASI and PGA.
• Test-retest reliability: The instrument exhibited high stability over time, with an intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.85.

“Findings of this study suggest that DermSat-7 is a valid and reliable instrument for measuring treatment satisfaction in patients with psoriasis in clinical trials and clinical practice,” the study authors concluded.