Researchers found a link between psoriasis and uncontrolled hypertension, which backs up past findings on the subject.
Through information from a medical records database, researchers determined patients with more severe psoriasis were more likely to develop uncontrolled hypertension, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania reported.
"Over the last several years, studies have shown that psoriasis, specifically severe psoriasis, is an independent risk factor for a variety of comorbidities, putting patients suffering with this common skin disease at an increased risk for other conditions such as heart attack and stroke," said Junko Takeshita, MD, PhD, clinical instructor in the department of Dermatology at Penn Medicine and co-first author on the study. "Knowing that psoriasis is tied to other health conditions, it's vital that we have a better understanding of the systemic effects it has on other areas of the body so that we can more closely monitor these patients and provide better and preventative care."
The study suggests patients with the highest risk of uncontrolled blood pressure are those with severe psoriasis, meaning at least three percent of their body is affected by the disease.
To make their findings researchers looked at a specific group within the THIN database called the Incident Health Outcomes and Psoriasis Events (iHOPE), which consisted of 9,000 patients with psoriasis classified by how much of their body was covered in the condition. This allowed the researchers to make more exact findings than ever before.
"Most large electronic databases such as THIN do not have information such as body surface area involvement or other direct measures of psoriasis severity, and we usually have to use surrogate measures such as receipt of a treatment that is indicated for more severe psoriasis to define psoriasis severity," Takeshita said.
While the findings do strongly suggest a link between hypertension and psoriasis, but the subject requires further analysis because the study fails to address the "chicken and egg" problem.
"Our hypothesis is that the psoriasis and the inflammation that comes with it are making the hypertension worse, but certainly it could go the other way, and understanding which comes first has important implications for how we care for these patients and our understanding of how these two conditions are related," Takeshita concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal JAMA Dermatology.
