Psoriasis a skin disease that causes red and itchy skin, commonly found everywhere and anywhere on the body. It goes through cycles that flare up as hyper aggressive or mild and subsides for short/long periods of time. One of my best friends lives with one of the most unique cases of psoriasis I have ever heard about. I’ve known my friend since elementary, so he pretty much tells me everything that happens in his life. Every now and then he’ll bring up a story of how his psoriasis kicked in at the most unfortunate of moments. He has psoriasis on his legs, ears, and especially his groin area. When a flare fires up, he says it feels as though his skin is on fire. Of course, its itchy skin so the normal reaction would be to scratch, but it only worsens the feeling.
He told me about the time he went to a theme park for vacation. At the beginning of the day, he was perfectly fine, nothing was wrong, and everything was great with his psoriasis. This theme park happened to be in a super dry environment, which meant disaster for my friend. As the day progressed his skin began to dry up. Psoriasis is easily recognizable as “scaly shiny translucent skin.” It kind of looks like lizard skin. By the end of the day, he said the “scales” were peeling off his skin, and the areas were begging to get red and inflamed. Because the pain was going down in the groin area, he was having difficulty walking through the park. The only form of relief was moisturizing the areas, but these remedies are only temporary.
My friend was recently given the option to use a medication known as Tremfaya. Psoriasis is an autoimmune issue and is primarily affected by cytokines signals known as interleukins. This medication works in blocking human interleukine-23, which is normally involved in inflammatory and immune responses. IL-23 drives the proliferation, differentiation, and survival of T- Helper cells. T-helper cells are the producers of more cytokines that cause the inflammatory response. So, if you block the cytokine, you block the response, which in turn should halt inflammation.
He tells me that Tremfaya is working wonders for him. His scaly skin has begun to disappear. His skin is beginning to look almost normal, and he is no longer itchy. This is all great, but Tremfaya is only a remedy and not a cure. For my friend to continue to live “psoriasis free,” he will need to inject the medication every 2 months for the rest of his life. It is shown that coming off the medication for more than 1 year, can revert the condition back to what it was. There are no cures of psoriasis currently. But for the time being it has helped my friend exponentially in his everyday life.
A family member of mine suffers from psoriasis as well, and while I can tell you it is much, much milder than your friend's, it is still a painful, embarrassing condition for him. Right now, he only uses topical creams to help manage the condition, but should his condition become more aggressive as he ages (which it may), he could have to use medications like Tremfaya for the rest of his life. While this is extremely unfortunate for anyone who has psoriasis, I think we should be thankful for temporary remedies that make conditions more manageable. However, we should be continuing to push towards discovering less demanding, non-chronic therapies and away from extensively invasive chronic therapies (such as injecting a medication every 2 months). I found a study that talks about the role of tonsillectomies and the therapeutic effects they have in individuals with certain variants of psoriasis. While this was only a single cohort study, the results look very promising. I sincerely hope that we eventually find a cure for this disease, for your friend's and my family member's sake, and in the meantime, we must continue to seek new and better ways of treating the disease.
ReplyDeleteRendon, A., & Schäkel, K. (2019). Psoriasis Pathogenesis and Treatment. International journal of molecular sciences, 20(6), 1475. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms20061475