AN OBJECTIVE METHOD TO RECORD CHANGES IN NASAL REACTIVITY DURING TREATMENT OF NONALLERGIC NASAL HYPERREACTIVITY

Non-allergic nasal hyperreactivity is a common problem and many patien ts suffer from daily symptoms demanding medication. Hitherto there exi sts no objective method to study congestional changes in clinical prac tice, to evaluate the efficacy of different therapies. This study is a n attempt to develop a method for this purpose. Eleven patients with n on-allergic nasal hyperreactivity entered the trial. A histamine chall enge model with three different histamine concentrations was used. Rec ordings of the reactivity of the nasal mucosa were made with rhinoster eometry before and after 14 days of topical treatment with budesonide 200 mu g/day. The results were compared to symptom scores before and a fter treatment. It was found that there was a significant improvement after treatment both with regard to symptom score and to the recorded reactivity of the nasal mucosa. There was a correlation between sympto m score and recorded reactivity before treatment, but not after treatm ent. The results indicate that the symptom score technique is sufficie nt in situations where only a semiquantitative method is required. How ever, when studying changes in the degree of hyperreactivity, the dema nds for an objective measuring method is greater. The study indicates that the presented method may be adapted for this purpose.