Testing for Persistent Atopic Dermatitis in Pediatric Patients

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 20s.

(00:30):

Do we do any type of specific testing to try to predict whether or not one kid will go on to get other atopic march characteristics? Truthfully, we don't. In patients who have, of course, we do testing to rule out other things that are not atopic dermatitis, like if we have patients who we think might have some type of genetic syndrome, which is manifesting with some eczema, that's a completely different scenario. In patients who we are starting on a biologic, we might get some baseline labs, even though it's not indicated in the label.

(01:05):

And if we get those baseline labs, we'll often get an IgE level just to look at how, quote-unquote, "atopic" they are. But I think this is all kind of just kind of to give us a feeling about the patients, but none of these give us actual information about atopic march and whether they're going to be continuing to have atopic dermatitis for long periods of time into the future.