Grenadian dermatologists awarded for a study on psoriasis
Professionals from the Virgen de las Nieves University Hospital, the Granada School of Medicine and the Biosanitary Research Institute of Granada, have obtained the award from the Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery of Eastern Andalusia for a study on the quality of life of people who coexist with patients with psoriasis. This work has been carried out by the dermatologists Eliseo Martinez, Agustín Buendía and Salvador Arias, researcher of the Tissue Engineering Group of the ibs.GRANADA.
In recent years, the scientific community has shown an increasing interest in the study of quality of life in patients with various pathologies. Thus, medicine, in its desire to move towards a more complete care of patients, has tried to understand the disease and help not only from the physical point of view, but also from the psychological and social level.
Psoriasis is an inflammatory disease that affects 1-2% of the population. Aware of this problem, and trying to fully understand how this pathology affects patients and the closest environment, these dermatologists have proposed a pioneering study in which the impact of this disease on their partners is analyzed.
The results show how these patients and those who live with them have a loss on their quality of life and their levels of anxiety and depression. The deterioration of these parameters among patients and their partners is closely related, showing in all cases worse values than those observed in the healthy population. 88% of the cohabitants state that they are affected by the patient's psoriasis, and 1/3 of them acknowledged that their quality of life was seriously affected by this problem.
In reference to dermatoses, these authors emphasize that it has been observed how their importance tends to be trivialized, perhaps because most of them occur without involvement of internal organs. However, there are several studies that show the great impact that dermatological pathologies have on the quality of life of those who suffer from them. This is due, in part, to the fact that the skin is the first element that people notice in their social relationships. In particular, there is evidence that patients with psoriasis are at higher risk of suffering from anxiety, depression and feelings of stigmatization.
