psoriasis tagged posts

New study shows there may be a way to help even more psoriasis patients. About 7.5 million Americans suffer from psoriasis, an autoimmune disease that shows up as patches of red, inflamed skin and painful, scaly rashes. Although there are effective treatments for psoriasis, not everyone responds to these therapies — and for many, the relief is temporary.

“These therapies don’t reduce disease by 100 percent, and they don’t cure the disease” says La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Professor Michael Croft, Ph.D. “And if you take patients off those drugs, the disease almost always comes back.”

Now Croft and his team in LJI’s Center for Autoimmunity and Inflammation have discovered how a key protein called TWEAK damages skin cells in psoriasis patients...

A research team has designed a simple electromechanical device that can be used for deep tissue pathology diagnosis, such as psoriasis, in an automated and non-invasive fashion. The findings will lay a foundation for future applications in the clinical evaluation of skin cancers and other dermatology diseases.

By putting a piece of soft, strain-sensing sheet on the skin may be able to detect skin disorders non-invasively and in real-time very soon.

The research is co-led by Dr Yu Xinge, Assistant Professor from CityU’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, and scientists from and Northwestern University ...

Stylised image: Urushiol (in green), the ‘active ingredient’ in poison ivy, entrapped by CD1a molecule (in pink), which mediates the inflammatory response. Credit: Imaging CoE

Finding the molecular cause of this irritation brings us a step closer to designing agents to block this mechanism and sheds light on other serious skin conditions, such as psoriasis. The international team of scientists have shown, for the first time, a connection between an immune molecule found in the skin and skin sensitisers...

Psoriasis on elbow. Credit: © hriana / Fotolia

Improvement persists for more than a year. About 80% of patients with moderate to severe psoriasis saw their disease completely or almost completely cleared with a new drug called ixekizumab, according to 3 large, long-term clinical trials led by NW Medicine. “This group of studies not only shows very high and consistent levels of safety and efficacy, but also that the great majority of the responses persist at least 60 weeks,” said Dr. Kenneth Gordon.

Affecting about 3% of the world’s population, psoriasis is an immune-mediated inflammatory disease that causes itchy, dry and red skin. It is also associated with an increased risk for depression, heart disease and diabetes, among other conditions...