Hyperhidrosis Disease Severity Scale

The scale asks a person to rate how tolerable their sweating is and how much it disrupts activities, using a small set of ordered choices. This gives clinicians a quick sense of severity from the patient's own perspective. It can help track whether the impact changes over time. Because it focuses on daily-life effect, it complements more physical measures of sweating. Its simplicity means it can be answered in moments during a visit. That focus on lived impact reflects that two people with similar sweat volume may be affected very differently. The response chosen places the severity on a short, ordered range. Repeating it later shows whether the burden has shifted. Its brevity makes it practical to use at more than one visit.

Rating one's sweating as barely tolerable and frequently interfering with activities is the kind of judgment the severity scale captures. Repeating the rating later can show whether the day-to-day burden has shifted, which a sweat-volume measurement alone would not reveal. A person whose rating improves after starting an option has a simple way to track that change over time.

It measures the impact on quality of life and can be paired with tests like the starch-iodine test that locate where sweating is heaviest.