Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to DermConsult on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Shannon Trotter, a board-certified dermatologist, Clinical Assistant Professor at Ohio University, and principal investigator for clinical trials at DOCS Dermatology Group in Ohio. She’ll be sharing her approach to developing personalized treatment plans for patients with generalized pustular psoriasis, or GPP. Let’s hear from her now.
Dr. Trotter:
The factors that guide my approach to developing a personalized treatment plan for my patients really include looking at the foundation, first and foremost, of GPP as a chronic skin condition. And that flare stage, it can be severe and emergent, but the aftermath or chronic phase sometimes is ignored, or it's thought of as insignificant. But you really talk with the patient more, and you see how personally in that phase in particular can affect them.
In particular, it affects them mentally, socially, psychologically. There's a lot of anxiety tied to that. And in fact, there's been a study done to show that a lot of patients feel like their provider has actually underestimated the impact that GPP can have on them mentally and socially, especially in regard to anxiety as well. And so you have to take into account thinking about your patient. If you're sitting there always wondering when you might actually flare, that can add a lot to the quality of life implications of having GPP and just the stress of living with it and knowing you could go back to that severe flare stage at some point in time.
So overall, I think understanding it's chronic, we want to offer that control to give that back to the patient and how it impacts their life. Are they able to function with maybe going to school or going to work? Socially, are they hanging out with friends? Are they able to sleep? You really have to dive a little deeper and find out how it's impacting the patient. And the beauty is now, with an FDA-approved medication to treat GPP, you can offer patients control during that chronic phase and potentially prevent flares, which is the goal.
So when you look at patient preferences, lifestyle considerations, and treatment goals, they factor into GPP therapy greatly. Obviously, when they have an acute flare or they're in that flare phase, they need treatment. That's an emergency. But for a lot of them, you're looking at their lifestyle. They want to maintain work, their social relationships, and the ability to go out and function in everyday society. So when they evolve into that chronic phase afterward, that plays a role in your treatment decisions too, because now you have the ability to control that for them with therapy.
And for a lot of these patients, their treatment goal is to not have that acute flare again. With treatment, we're going after that flare phase, which patients definitely want us to treat and rein in, especially as a dermatologic emergency in those situations. And on the other side of the coin, we are trying to offer them that control. GPP is a chronic condition, and sometimes we forget about that because that flare phase just dominates our mindset of how we think about GPP. But for a patient, their treatment goal is to not go back to that flare phase, and I would argue as a provider, that's also our intent.
So now we have a medication that can achieve both: treatment during the flare phase and then again to tackle that chronic phase as well. So for our patients, I think that plays well into their preferences because that's usually their goal is not to go back and to have control overall for their condition. And it really does tend to fit better with how people want to live their lives—that relief from what I call FOF, or fear of flaring. For a lot of patients, they don't want to think about, "Oh my gosh, could I have another acute flare of GPP?" And so that plays a role, again, in how we address not only treatment for the acute phase, but also during that chronic phase, so we can actually give them the best of both worlds.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Shannon Trotter discussing personalized care for patients with generalized pustular psoriasis, or GPP. To access this and other episodes in this series, visit DermConsult on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
