OBJECTIVES: To assess predictive factors and risk profiles for treatment response in patients with allergic rhinitis. It was the aim to create a platform giving support to the development of interventions optimizing the daily use as well as the sustainability of the existing national and international guidelines and therewith minimizing the progression to severe chronic upper airway diseases. METHODS: For this purpose, 76,981 case reports of patients with allergic rhinitis from ten post-marketing-studies in Germany were aggregated by the use of an IPD meta-analysis. The data pool was examined in terms of significant predictive factors by univariat methods, logistic regression and discriminant analysis. The predictive ability of the model was assessed by a 10 fold crossvalidation. RESULTS: First, we investigated the data pool as a whole, and the results showed that 20.6% of the patients did not respond to their therapy. Especially patients who were treated according to current guidelines had a higher risk of non-response (28% vs. 19.3%). Next, we examined the data pool in terms of significant predictive factors resulting in non-response of patients receiving an adequate guideline-conform therapy. The primary baseline determinants were a positive history of allergy in the family, duration and severity of disease, the periodicity of an allergen (perennial allergens) and concomitant diseases. Especially patients with asthma as well as patients suffering from more than one concomitant disease had a higher risk of non-response (32.4% and 34%). The main follow up determinants were patient’s compliance, safety and the treatment process. A total of 63.4% of patients with a poor compliance, which was enforced by an inadequate safety were non-responder. CONCLUSIONS: These results support the findings of current clinical trials describing a non-responder rate of about 20% and encourage efforts to optimize guidelines as well as to achieve a sustainability of guidelines.