A spatial relationship between onycholysis and oil spots, with the intra-nail location of onycholysis being more distal compared to the nearest oil spots, was one of the primary observations in a new analysis of nail psoriasis published in Annals of Dermatology.
“Analysis of the Intra-Nail Location of Nail Psoriasis,” authored by researchers at Seoul National University College of Medicine in Korea, sought to explore the shared pathophysiology among various phenotypes of nail psoriasis.
“We aimed to understand the association between nail psoriasis lesions and analyze their intra-nail locations,” the authors wrote.
Using 5,602 cropped fingernail images from 636 patients with psoriasis, the researchers used the Computer Vision Annotation Tool to annotate the intra-nail locations of lesions and computed χ² statistics to examine the relationship between the lesions and analyze their intra-nail locations.
“Based on the number of lesions, nail pitting was the most common, followed by leukonychia, with the red spots in the lunula being the rarest,” they wrote. “We elucidated the associations between different nail psoriasis lesions, pinpointing a significant association between onycholysis and oil spots (χ² statistic=1,623.88), followed by onycholysis-subungual hyperkeratosis (1,607.50), and subungual hyperkeratosis-oil spots (985.76).”
In addition to the spatial relationship between onycholysis and oil spots, a distribution pattern of nail psoriasis was demonstrated, where nail matrix lesions were primarily located at the center of the nail, and nail bed lesions were predominantly located near the lateral nail folds.
“This study represents a pioneering analysis of the intra-nail location of nail psoriasis lesions, revealing substantial associations and spatial relationships between different lesions,” the authors wrote.