Editor’s Note:
With “sincere apologies for the slow pace,” our current contact at UCLA (Nolan Mahoney) has provided a long-awaited update. Nolan reports that three articles are in the queue for publication in medical journals. In otherwords, the pots we are watching belong to publications over which we — and UCLA — have no control.
Here is a quick review of what we may see in print by PRP Awareness Month … 2020 or 2021. Keep watching the pot.
From Nolan Maloney, UCLA Researcher — Unedited
So sorry for the slow pace on this – we’ve actively been working on the project for the last few months. There are three articles that we currently have either submitted for review or are very close to submitting.
Article #1 is on characterizing disease features and other medical diagnoses in PRP patients. As you alluded to in our conversations earlier, some of the disease features experienced by PRP patients are scantly described in the literature and not well understood by dermatologists. This includes inability to sweat, swelling of the skin, joint pain, amongst other features. It is my hope that when published this article brings greater attention to these features. The second point of this article is to describe the other diagnoses that exist in PRP patients. Here, we focus on that 1/6th of patients reported a depression diagnosis, representing an important point that there is a near complete absence of medical literature discussing association of PRP with mental health conditions, and this is critical for dermatologists to recognize such that we can better take care of prp patients.
Related to this, article #2 is an indepth look at quality of life impairment due to PRP. We show that PRP is amongst the most disabling of all dermatologic diagnoses in terms of quality of life. We highlight that depression, anxiety are frequently reported by patients, and a small number report experiencing suicidality at some point. We used an analysis called multivariate logistic regressions to see if there we could identify factors independently predictive of worse quality of life in PRP. We found that it wasn’t the presence or any specific disease feature (such as erythroderma, hair loss, joint pain etc.), but rather was the existence or a co-occurring mental health condition.
Article #3 describes dermatologists use of different therapies to treat PRP. We were curious what the utilization of biologics as first-line agents as well as other systemic therapies was. We show that first-line use of biologics is low, but that many patients eventually do receive them. We also looked to identify whether dermatologists managed patients with erythroderma differently. We found that it did not affect their choice to use a biologic as a first-line treatment, but erythrodermic patients were more likely to receive multiple, non-biologic systemic agents (retinoids, cyclosporine, methotrexate, apremilast).
We also had planned to present data from the survey at this year’s AAD meeting in Denver—however regrettably this was canceled.
Sincere apologies for the slow pace on these things — I hope this helps. We have been bogged down significantly by other commitments especially as of recently.
For more information about the UCLA PRP Survey, please contact Bill McCue, Editor, PRP Survival Guide. Email: editor@prpSurvivalGuide.org.