Welcome to ACORN

Acne is one of the most common skin conditions affecting millions of people worldwide.  There are considerable negative effects of acne including lifelong scarring, feelings of low self-esteem, and an impaired quality of life.

Acne often requires treatment with combinations of drugs, many of which are expensive. Huge amounts of money are spent annually (billions of US healthcare dollars) on acne treatment for office visits, over-the-counter and prescription drugs with little or no ability to estimate the benefit. In this time of changing paradigms in health care delivery, it is essential that health care providers base treatment decisions on data generated through evidence-based analyses.

The lack of standardization of how acne is assessed in clinical trials makes it difficult to pool data from different trials of the same treatment and impossible for clinicians to know the relative effectiveness of different types of treatment.  Health care providers need this information to guide their treatment recommendations for patients with acne.

The Acne Core Outcomes Research Network (ACORN) was formed by an international group of experts who are interested in improving how acne and its impact are measured.  The first step will be to use a mixed methods approach to reach consensus on a core set of outcomes.  The goal of our project is to develop a “tool box” of validated methods to assess acne that can be adopted by researchers conducting acne clinical trials worldwide.   Use of these standardized outcome measures would generate useful information to help guide treatment recommendations.

To help us identify core outcomes and develop universally applicable methods to assess them, we hope to receive input from patients, acne experts, healthcare providers, regulatory agency representatives, journal editors, and other professionals from all over the world.