The principal idea of SCIO is that it reflects the complete outgrowth time of the affected part of the nail.
This is crucial in systemic antifungal therapy since the presence of antifungal (at concentrations above MIC) in the nail is required until regrowth of affected part. That's why one should take into account not only the severity pattern of onychomycosis but also its growth rate.
For this reason we overcame the custom of many clinical indexes to simply add one factor to another and then count the arithmetic mean. In SCIO we independently assess the growth-influencing ‘natural physiologic’ factors for whole nail and clinical factors that define the affected part. We divide all key factors into two groups:
1. Factors that define the clinical pattern (severity) and due to this impact initial treatment approach.
2. Factors that determine the nail growth rate of individual and due to this impact the outcome, i.e. time to achieve cure.