Hyperhidrosis Priority Setting Partnership: the top 10 research priorities for management and treatment of hyperhidrosis.

Hyperhidrosis is a common skin condition characterised by abnormal levels of sweating, and affects 1 -3 % of the population. It can cause both physical problems and psychological distress, and significantly affect quality of life. Priority setting partnerships (PSPs) enable patients and clinicians to work together on an equal footing to identify questions about treatments that cannot be answered by existing research. This study aimed to identify and prioritise the top ten most important questions relating to management and treatment of hyperhidrosis. A steering group of patients, clinicians, and researchers agreed the PSP terms of reference and methodology. Patients and clinicians were invited to complete a survey to propose questions about management and treatment of hyperhidrosis that they would like research to answer. Next the questions were reviewed to remove those out of scope of the PSP, and to form indicative questions to group duplicate and very similar submissions together. These questions were checked against existing scientific literature and removed if the question had already been answered by a systematic review. Survey participants were asked to rank the remaining questions in order of priority. A final workshop was held to prioritise the Top 10 research questions from a shortlist of 23, through a facilitated process. The first survey was completed by 268 participants, who proposed 592 research questions. Out of these, 160 were deemed to be out of scope. From the remaining 462 questions, 48 indicative questions were formed. Three of these were considered to already be answered by existing research, so 45 questions went into the second survey. After participants ranked their top ten from these 45 questions, 23 were selected for the final workshop, where the Top Ten research questions were chosen. Hyperhidrosis is currently under-researched compared with skin disorders with similar prevalence, and it is hoped that publication of the Top Ten to research funders will enable them to direct funds towards answering the questions that matter most to people with hyperhidrosis and the clinicians that treat them.