Transcript
When I'm talking to patients and their parents who are coming in for a condition like atopic dermatitis or psoriasis or alopecia areata, and we're talking about using a systemic agent, whether it's an injectable or a pill, the most common question I get asked is, "How long will my child need to be on this medicine?" And the truth is it's highly variable.
In the case of atopic [00:00:30] dermatitis, I think there's reason to believe that early management can actually encourage kids to outgrow the condition. And so if I'm seeing a two-year-old with atopic dermatitis and we're about to start Dupi, we're going to keep them on Dupi until they've been good for a while. And then we're going to start increasing the time between the S-H-O-Ts to see how it goes. If they're able to space out to every eight to 10 weeks, they're okay to stop the medicine, and there's a chance that either they've outgrown the condition or it's less severe than [00:01:00] it was when we started.
For something like psoriasis, I think that's a more difficult question because I think there are advantages to keeping patients with psoriasis on their therapy for a long, long time. We know that psoriasis is a systemic disease of systemic consequences, and we assume that by treating that disease systemically, we're reducing those comorbidity risks. So I think there is reason to encourage patients to stay on their psoriasis biologic or pill.
