Prevalence of phenotypes related to perennial AR
Figure 1 shows the changes in the prevalence of the 8 phenotypes related to early AR. The prevalence of ”classical AR” that met all 3 criteria was 2.9% at enrollment, 17.1% at the 1st-year visit and 29.5% at the 2nd-year visit. The prevalence of ”subclinical AR”—in which nasal eosinophilia and HDM sensitization were present even when there were no nasal symptoms—also increased from 3.3% at entry to 11.7 % and 26.6 %, respectively, at the 2 later time-points. In contrast, the prevalence of the ”no rhinitis” phenotype, which met none of the 3 criteria, decreased from 33.1% to 15.2% and 8.4%, respectively (Fig. 1).
Since the presence/absence of each criterion individually had the potential to have changed at each visit, a positive finding did not always persist throughout the study. Figure 2 shows the actual numbers of subjects classified as 3+ criteria and 2+ criteria (AR-like phenotypes), HDM-sensitization-only, and other non-AR phenotypes at each visit. Overall, it can be seen that the AR-like phenotypes increased during the observation period, whereas the HDM-sensitization-only phenotype population remained small, and the other non-AR phenotypes decreased markedly (Fig. 2).