Abstract
Background: Urticaria is a common condition presenting both as acute and chronic disease within primary care. To those without specialist training it is poorly understood from the points of view of diagnosis and management. It causes a considerable disease burden to sufferers with marked impact on quality of life. Purpose of this review: The recent publication of the EAACI/GA²LEN/Euro-GuiDerm/APAAACI Guideline for the Definition, Classification, Diagnosis and Management of Urticaria guideline prompted us to take this excellent resource and re-configure its findings and recommendations to a non-specialist audience with particular reference to the needs of the primary care team. K E Y W O R D S acute urticaria, chronic urticaria, primary care, urticaria management 1 | INTRODUCTION Skin diseases are the fourth leading cause of non-fatal morbidity worldwide 1 with urticaria accounting for 0.45% of all years lost to disability (YLD). 2 Skin conditions are the most common new reason people present to general practitioners (GPs), a discipline in which many GPs have not had appropriate training; in England and Wales they account for approximately 8.4% of all consultations, 3 whereas in Spain 5.4% of consultations are mainly for a dermatological problem. 4 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.