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ENFRES
Aquaprurigo Self-check

Two minutes

Does your itch match the aquagenic pattern?

Four of these six questions come from a questionnaire built and validated specifically to work out which cases of water-triggered itching need a blood test. At the end you get a plain summary you can copy and take to an appointment.

Reviewed 31 July 20262 references1 min read

1/6Does the itching start during or just after contact with water?

Tap water, a shower or bath, rain, the sea, a swimming pool, or heavy sweating all count.

2/6During an episode, can you see raised hives or welts?

Look at the skin while it is itching. Redness from scratching is not the same as raised welts that stand above the skin.

3/6Once it starts, how long does the itching last?

Published series put the average around 40 minutes, but the range runs from a few minutes to over two hours.

4/6Does the itching involve your abdomen?

The stomach and belly area. Answer for a typical episode rather than the worst one you remember.

5/6Does the itching ever start with no contact with water at all?

Episodes that arrive out of nowhere, without a shower, sweat, rain or humidity.

6/6Do you avoid, cut short or dread washing because of it?

Shorter showers, skipping them, planning your day around them, or feeling anxious beforehand.

Add your experience

Aquagenic pruritus has almost no comparable patient data — which is exactly why it gets dismissed. Two fields is all this needs.

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Where these questions come from

Questions 3 to 6 are the four items that survived development of the Aquagenic Pruritus Questionnaire (APQ), a patient-reported measure built across six German centres and validated in 76 people with aquagenic pruritus (37 of whom had a myeloproliferative neoplasm) against 76 people with other chronic itch.1

Those four items are itch duration after water contact, whether the abdomen is involved, whether itching also occurs spontaneously, and water-avoidance behaviour. Scored together by the researchers' weighted index, the APQ reached a sensitivity of 97.3% and a specificity of 79.5% for identifying an underlying myeloproliferative neoplasm.1

This page does not reproduce that weighted score, and deliberately so — a validated instrument belongs in a clinic, with someone qualified to interpret it, and a score presented to a worried reader without that context does more harm than good. What this check does is show you which recognised features your pattern includes, so you can raise them by name.

The strongest single item is duration. Abdominal involvement carries similar weight: among patients whose aquagenic itch was not associated with a blood disorder, the large majority reported no abdominal itching at all.1 Neither observation can tell you anything about your own body — they describe how groups of patients differed.

References

Each figure on this page links to the study it came from, with the sample size shown so you can weigh it yourself. Where a claim rests on a single case report or a self-selected survey, it says so.

  1. Witte F, Weisshaar E, Metz M, et al. Aquagenic Pruritus Questionnaire: predicting myeloproliferative neoplasms in patients with aquagenic pruritus. Dermatology and Therapy 2025. doi:10.1007/s13555-025-01548-2 Developed across six centres; validated in 76 patients with aquagenic pruritus (37 with an MPN) vs 76 chronic-pruritus controls link.springer.com ↩
  2. Le Gall-Ianotto C, et al. Differences between aquagenic and non-aquagenic pruritus in myeloproliferative neoplasms: an observational study of 500 patients. Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology 2023;37(6):1175–83. doi:10.1111/jdv.18990 504 patients; 112 with aquagenic pruritus pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↩