November 2023

Do you suffer from keloid scars?

Do you suffer from keloid scars? We are a group of scientists from King’s College London who would love to hear from you.

A few years ago, many of you reading the British Skin Foundation Blog already answered a survey for us. Its results were vital in helping us decide what to focus on in our research – for example they helped us broaden our focus to tackle both keloid pain and itch. Armed with this information, we now need to ask some more questions to an even larger group of people – that way, we can fully understand and study how keloids affect different people differently. For example, do your scars impact your daily living because of their appearance? Or do they cause you pain or itch or both?

How do we plan to do this?

We are asking people with at least one keloid scar to answer questions about their keloid appearance, symptoms, social impact, pain, itch and other characteristics. Most of the questions in this second survey come from ‘validated questionnaires’, which means they were approved by researchers in other areas to accurately assess the intensity and type of sensation you may experience, or the impact of your scar on your daily living. There are a few questions we have designed ourselves, based on what we have learned from our previous survey. If you have already filled in our first questionnaire, we would love to hear from you again. Some questions may sound similar, but they’re part of an established questionnaire, so we need to ask them again to ensure we stick to the scientifically approved ‘validation’.

We expect completion of questionnaire will take about 10-15 minutes. The questionnaire results will be anonymous; that is, we won’t ask for any identifiable personal details.

Why are we asking for your help?

We want our research to be of use to individuals living with keloid scars – so we need to hear from as many of you as possible to understand the full spectrum of experiences. From this we can then focus our cellular analyses of scars on certain aspects which may make keloids more symptomatic.

For instance, we are currently studying what makes keloids either painful or itchy (or both or neither!), but we don’t yet know the types of pain you may feel (burning, sharp, tingling) or where you feel these sensations (e.g., where your scar joins your normal skin or in the centre?). 

We would love to hear from you!

Please fill out this anonymous questionnaire to help us better understand the impact of keloid scars.  

Amy, Tanya & Fran

Miss Amy Lock, PhD Candidate, King’s College London
Dr Tanya Shaw, King’s College London
Dr Franziska Denk, King’s College London

If you have any questions regarding this post, please email Amy Lock at [email protected].

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