Updates in Undifferentiated Eczema: Taking a Practical Approach to Care

Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, Dr. Raj Chovatiya will share his insights on the Maui Derm 2025 conference. Dr. Chovatiya is a Clinical Associate Professor at the Rosalind Franklin University Chicago Medical School and Founder and Director of the Center for Medical Dermatology and Immunology Research in Chicago. Let’s hear from him now.

Dr. Chovatiya:
Eczema has been a hot topic in the last half decade, or decade if you want to say, particularly atopic dermatitis, the most common chronic form of eczema that we see on a day-to-day basis and one that has had multiple approvals in the topical, oral, and biologic realm. But remember, eczema is a larger morphologic group of diagnoses that oftentimes have some mechanistic similarities but some mechanistic differences, and thus, there’s not always going to be a one-size-fits-all approach to treatment as well as diagnosis.

So in this session, we had a chance to talk about some of the other eczemas, particularly what do you do when things are happening on the face, and what do you do when things are happening on the hand. And so I really had a chance to dig deep into seborrheic dermatitis, a very common eczematous eruption—and, yeah, that is officially classified as an eczema even though it has features of both eczema and psoriasis—and this disease can affect the scalp, the face, and other parts of the body. And we have seen some really cool research in the last few years showing that this is an immensely common and burdensome condition and one that our current treatments don’t do a great job of treating, and we’ve had some especially exciting new approvals in this space, particularly in the case of roflumilast foam that we had a chance to dig a little deeper into.

Chronic hand eczema was something else that we had a chance to talk a lot about: what is it in terms of the signs and symptoms you think about with this condition; how do you define it; and the fact that it’s a really heterogeneous entity that includes elements of allergic contact, irritant contact, atopic dermatitis, and other eczemas as well. Sometimes it’s really hard to parse out. Therefore, it’s up to us to really figure out what’s best for our patients in terms of pursuing treatment and, perhaps, streamlining our approach to using various types of diagnostics.

Finally, allergic contact dermatitis was peppered all through this session, really to say not every single person on the face of the earth needs to get patch tested, and I think that we need to use a little bit of judicious medical decision-making to figure out who those people are, especially when to comes to eyelid dermatitis, facial dermatitis, and hand dermatitis.  And so we had a chance to review a lot of tips and tricks for what are going to be the highest-yield scenarios that you want to make sure that you are thinking about in allergic contact dermatitis for your patients.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Raj Chovatiya sharing his insights on the Maui Derm 2025 conference. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!