Extract

Funding sources: Institut Brestois Santé‐Agro‐Matière (IBSAM), Faculty of Medicine, Brest, France.

Conflicts of interest: none declared.

Dear Editor, Aquagenic pruritus (AP) is a diffuse itching sensation that develops immediately after water contact without any visible skin changes. AP is classically associated with polycythaemia vera (PV), a BCR‐ABL1‐negative myeloproliferative neoplasm (MPN), and can precede the diagnosis of the disease.1  2 Alternatively, AP can be drug induced or associated with various disorders (e.g. myelodysplastic syndrome, hypereosinophilic syndrome or juvenile xanthogranuloma).3  4 Patients describe AP as the most troublesome symptom of their disease, with consequences on both physical and social activities. Unfortunately, AP is frequently not ameliorated by controlling the underlying disease.

Although AP is very well known in PV, few publications have reported it during the course of essential thrombocythaemia (ET) or myelofibrosis (MF), and data about its prevalence and characteristics in these pathologies remain lacking.3,5,6,7 We conducted a prospective study using a questionnaire that was adapted from a previous form on 70 patients with MPN (43 PV, 15 ET, 12 MF; all patients were positive for Janus kinase V617F mutation) who reported AP at onset or later during the course of MPN.8 Clinical data for the patients and details of the methods are provided in Appendix S1 and Table S1 (see Supporting Information).

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