Fig. 1

TNSS is comparable between placebo and NCC 2461 administration. a The correlation between daily grass pollen counts during the trial period and daily TNSS values is represented; both parameters reached maximum values in the last week of May, 20 days after the start of the trial, and no significant differences were observed between the study groups. The solid and broken curves represent Loess local smoothing method (with 95 % level of confidence) applied to TNSS scores of placebo and NCC 2461 groups, respectively, in order to summarize daily symptom scores. The volatile line refers to daily pollen counts with corresponding levels (referring to the right vertical axis). Pollen data were provided by the Geowissenschaften Institut für Meteorologie of the Freie Universität in Berlin. b Mean TNSS score for each week of each subject was calculated; boxplots represent the weekly mean for the two study groups