Assessing nasal symptom control.

Rhinitis is a common chronic disease that significantly impacts morbidity, health care costs, work and school productivity, and quality of life. Therefore, appropriate management is paramount to help to reduce the burden of disease. In current clinical practice, there are no validated instruments widely used to assess rhinitis control. In this review, we describe the tools available for assessing nasal symptom control in patients with rhinitis. The recently developed Allergic Rhinitis Control Assessment is a promising tool with demonstrated validity, reliability, and ease of use. Health care providers are encouraged to use the rhinitis-specific tools and incorporate other objective measures, such as rhinoscopy and rhinometric techniques, when evaluating patients with rhinitis. Further research is needed to evaluate the benefits and shortcomings of the available rhinitis- and rhinosinusitis-specific instruments to establish their role in clinical practice.