Management of urticaria: not too complicated, not too simple

In spite of being an old disease and apparently easy to diagnose, chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) is still perceived as an uncontrollable and difficult to manage disease. The perception of the patient is that his/her condition is not well understood and that is suffering from a disorder with hidden causes that doctors are not able to tackle. Sometimes patients go through a number of clinicians until they found some CSU expert who is familiar with the disease. It is surprising that myths and believes with no scientific support still persist. Guidelines are not widely implemented, and recent tools to assess severity are infrequently used. European and American recent guidelines do not agree in several key points related to diagnosis and treatment, which further contributes to confusion. With the aim to clarify some aspects of the CSU picture, a group of allergists and dermatologists from the Spanish Dermatology and Allergy societies developed a Frequent Asked Questions leaflet that could facilitate physicians work in daily practice and contribute to a better knowledge of common clinical scenarios related to patients with CSU.