Assessing lips treatment: TEOXANE creates a photonumeric scale to evaluate aesthetic improvement

TEOXANE created its own single-score scale to grade the overall fullness of upper and lower lips: Teoxane Lip Fullness Scale (TLFS). The TLFS is a 5‐grade photonumeric scale, developed by clinical experts based on real subject photographs and was validated through both photographic and live subjects' evaluation.

Lips are playing a significant role in the facial aesthetic perception and are important for social interactions^1,2 . Nowadays, treatment such as hyaluronic acid-based fillers being available and reversible, lips procedures have become increasingly popular³ . With it came the need of dedicated and objective tools to assess the safety and effectiveness of dermal fillers in this target indication.

Thereby, TEOXANE created its own single-score scale to grade the overall fullness of upper and lower lips: Teoxane Lip Fullness Scale (TLFS). The TLFS is a 5‐grade photonumeric scale, developed by clinical experts based on real subject photographs and was validated through both photographic and live subjects' evaluation.

Using a collection of photographs taken from 208 volunteers subjects, a working group composed of three clinical experts agreed on the “true value” severity grades of each subject's overall lip fullness, grading them from 1 to 5 (Very Thin to Very Full). Subjects were male and female, at least 21 years of age, with a variety of races/ethnicities, Fitzpatrick Skin Phototypes, and degrees of lip fullness.

Analysis of responses given by the evaluators indicated that evaluators were able to detect a 1‐point difference on the TLFS scale in 90% of side‐by‐side photographs. Additionally, evaluators provided an overall correct assessment 92% of the time when there was either no difference or a 2‐point difference between subjects. These scores exceed the minimal acceptable threshold for use in a clinical trial, which was set at 80%. This study confirms the scale is adequate and robust for measuring the feature of interest, here the lip fullness, and to guarantee repeatable and reproductible subject evaluations.
The live validation provides an adequate representation of real‐life subjects presenting to the clinician during clinical trials or in routine practice. This is the first to date esthetic lip fullness scale to be entirely live validated among other published scales.

You can read the full article by clicking here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9413955/