A multidisciplinary panel of experts in gastroenterology and immunology recently developed a simplified scoring tool to grade clinical severity of eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE). The Index of Severity for EoE (I-SEE) is a novel tool to assist clinicians in managing EoE by standardizing illness components reflecting illness severity along with eosinophil counts.

Therapeutic choices and therapy for EoE are guided by disease activity and severity, although the method used by practitioners to assess severity differs. Thus, researchers sought to develop an international consensus severity score index for EoE in order to lessen variation in clinical practice patterns and assist doctors to track clinical course of illness in an office setting.

Three teams were formed by an international group of researchers and doctors with expertise in adult and paediatric EoE as well as non-EoE allergy, immunology, and gastroenterology to inspect literature on symptoms, endoscopy, and histology of EoE in relation to severity and advancement. A steering committee organized a one-day virtual meeting to agree on prominent severity criteria across pivotal clinicopathologic categories and distil elements that would enable medical care professionals to classify illness severity.

The I-SEE can be used during routine clinic visits to examine severity of illness utilizing a point scale of 15 for severe EoE, 7–14 for moderate, and 0–6 for mild. It combines symptoms, complications, and fibrostenotic and inflammatory traits on both endoscopic and histologic examinations. This tool must be validated and refined utilizing data from future trials and routine clinical practice in order to enhance its functionality and use.