Evaluation of caregiver-reported criteria for diagnosing eczema in young children.

Eczema or atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic relapsing inflammatory skin disease with a peak incidence in the first 2 years of life1 . Physician diagnosis of AD is still problematic as there is variability in diagnosing AD, especially in young children, and validation studies on diagnostic accuracy and criteria of physician diagnosis of AD are lacking. Furthermore, mild to moderate AD is easily controllable with topical treatment, such as moisturizers and corticosteroids 2 , which results in children with AD presenting at the doctor's office with a normal skin. Epidemiological studies often employ caregiver-reported history of a physician-diagnosed AD as a proxy measure to estimate AD prevalence in children 3,4 .