Distinguishing Transient Pediatric Atopic Dermatitis from Persistent or Early-onset Atopic March Cases

Dawn Eichenfield (00:07):

Hi, my name is Dawn Eichenfield and I am a pediatric dermatologist at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego. I am also assistant professor of dermatology at the University of California in San Diego. I predominantly see pediatric and adolescent patients in my practice. I also see some adults because some of our kids like to stay with us into their early twenties. I think we always want to figure out ways that we can tell and counsel families on which patients will develop, continue to have atopic dermatitis and which patients will "grow out" of atopic dermatitis.

(00:43):

I do tell some families that there are a couple of clinical scenarios where we think that they are more likely to continue to have atopic dermatitis into adulthood, but I also, at the same time, tell them we really can't predict this. There's no biological marker, there's no lab test. It's really hard to predict who's going to continue to have really bad atopic dermatitis.

(01:03):

Some things we look for, if you have severe persistent atopic dermatitis as a young kid, you will likely continue to have AD when you are older, if you have a strong family history of atopic dermatitis, and then if you have other atopic march-type symptoms such as food allergies or asthma or environmental allergies, I think these all kind of come together and these are the things that kind of predict a little bit whether or not someone will continue to have atopic dermatitis into their adulthood.