Differences in Atopic Dermatitis, Psoriasis in Skin of Color, with Raj Chovatiya, MD, PhD

At the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) Annual Meeting in Orlando, Raj Chovatiya, MD, PhD, presented alongside a series of other leaders in dermatology to discuss the nuances of managing dermatologic diseases in patients with skin of color.

Chovatiya—known for his work as clinical associate professor of medicine at Rosalind Franklin University Chicago Medical School and as founder and director of the Center for Medical Dermatology + Immunology Research in Chicago—spoke with HCPLive about the biggest takeaways from his talk for other dermatologists to be aware of.

“The concept or idea of skin of color, which means a lot of different things to a lot of different folks, whether you're talking about skin tone,” Chovatiya said. “Whether you're talking about race, whether you're talking about ethnicity, whether you're talking about some combination of all those, has really been just a interesting and exciting area, because there's been a lot of focus in the last few years and in each of the disease states that I have been speaking on in AAD.”

Chovatiya noted that in atopic dermatitis and psoriasis, a lot of very specific investigations into expanding clinicians’ understanding of what some of the differences are across diverse patient groups.

“In the case of atopic dermatitis, there's so many extrinsic factors that drive disease, it's probably a much larger reason why we sometimes may note and see different intrinsic changes probably driven a lot by the external environment,” Chovatiya explained. “...This could be anything about where you live, what the pollution looks like around you, what your diet's like, what the climate, temperature, humidity, and or various weather type, what maternal care was like before you were born, antibiotic use patterns, and essentially the entire exposome atopic dermatitis.”

Chovatiya also spoke on psoriasis and its appearance among diverse patient populations. He highlighted that psoriasis is a relatively homogeneous disease, in the sense that immunologically the condition works fairly similarly in every single patient. Consequently, therapeutic outcomes are similar across groups of patients.

“We know that from an actual phenotypic standpoint, we again reviewed a lot of different pictures, and a lot of the differences that we may expect to see based on background and skin tone largely manifest as different shades of erythema and oftentimes slightly different patterns of lichenification,” Chovatiya said. “And then finally, when thinking about what some of the burdens are for psoriasis, we do know that there is more diagnosis of psoriasis actually in those of White majority race groups than non-White as well.”

For additional information on this session, view the full video interview posted above. To learn more about topics covered at AAD, view our latest coverage here.

The quotes used in this interview summary were edited for clarity.