Psoriasis, a condition that causes flaky patches of skin covered with white scales, affects about 3% of people in the UK and Europe. Of those, it’s been shown that up to a third will go on to develop a related arthritis (psoriatic arthritis: PsA) that causes joints and tendons to become inflamed and painful.
A new study is looking for 2000 volunteers in the UK to understand the factors leading to patients developing PsA.
‘At the moment there is no way to predict which patients with psoriasis are likely to go on to develop joint problems,’ said Professor Laura Coates, NIHR Clinician Scientist and Senior Clinical Research Fellow at NDORMS, University of Oxford, who is leading the project in collaboration with a team at University College Dublin. ‘We think this group of patients will help us to completely change how we think about the development of PsA and how to predict it. It will help us to design prevention studies, where we would offer potential drug treatments or lifestyle interventions (like exercise or stress management) to see if we can prevent people with psoriasis developing arthritis.’