Original articleAcquired cold urticaria: Clinical features, particular phenotypes, and disease course in a tertiary care center cohort
Section snippets
Study design
This retrospective study was based on the review of clinical charts from patients with primary (idiopathic) ACU who were referred to the Urticaria Clinic of the Department of Dermatology of Hospital del Mar (Barcelona) between January 2005 and December 2015. The diagnosis of cold urticaria was based on a patient's clinical history of wheals, angioedema, or both immediately after cold exposure. Patients with positive evidence of an underlying condition associated with the induction of cold
Description of the study population
During the study period, 1030 patients with chronic urticaria were referred to our department. Seventy-four patients (7.2%) presented with definite symptoms of ACU and were included in the study. All these patients were diagnosed with idiopathic ACU because no secondary causes were found. The clinical characteristics of the study population are summarized in Table I. Forty-seven patients (63.5%) were female; the mean age was 38.3 ± 19.0 years, while the mean age at symptoms onset was
Discussion
Cold urticaria is a cutaneous disorder that represents a small proportion of chronic urticarias (7-8% in our series). ACU can affect subjects from both sexes and may start at any age, although it has been postulated that middle-aged women are most often affected.2, 5 Similarly, we found a female predominance in our population, and the most frequent age at disease onset ranged from 23 to 41 years.
In the present study, disease severity was classified based on the extension of the urticarial
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Cited by (0)
Funding sources: None.
Conflicts of interest: None declared.
Ethical approval was granted by the Clinical Research Ethics Committee of the Hospital del Mar (approval no. 2016/6617/I).
Supplemental figures are available at http://www.jaad.org.