Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to DermConsult on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Christopher Bunick, who’s an Associate Professor of Dermatology at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. He’ll be discussing how chronic hand eczema can impact a patient’s quality of life. Here’s Dr. Bunick now.
Dr. Bunick:
Chronic hand eczema can impact patients’ lives substantially. For children, it affects their ability to sleep, study, go to school, make friends, and play with friends. With adolescent patients, I mean, this is a very formative time period of a person's life, right? You're making friends, going to high school, and maybe figuring out college—really, you're trying to establish your independent identity, if you think about it, in the teenage years. And if you can't shake someone's hand, hold someone's hand, hold a pencil or a pen in school, or if you can't play basketball or sports, it can affect everything from personal lives and social lives to studies, sports activities, and exercise. In adulthood, it affects a patient's ability to work, function at home, and even have intimate or social lives.
And this is where chronic hand eczema really hurts patients. It's not just scaling of the hands. It's not just itch. It can be all of that—scaling, itch, pain, swelling, and redness—and together, it's very unpredictable. It goes up or it flares up, it comes down, and then it goes back up. It's very unpredictable; it waxes and wanes. And this is that chronicity factor that really adds insult to injury, so to speak, and so the patients never know when they're going to actually finally get long-lasting relief and be able to have a normal life.
It can have a pretty tremendous effect on the physical and emotional quality of life, and that impact on the emotions can also lead to certain facts that we know about chronic hand eczema, which is there's high rates of anxiety and depression as well as suicidal ideation because of the impact that the disease can have on patients. And this is why, in my opinion, not just in dermatology but in all of medicine, we should pay attention to the patients that have chronic hand eczema. And if you're not a dermatologist and you see a patient and they have chronic hand eczema, either help treat them or refer them to someone who can because you can absolutely reshape someone's life.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Christopher Bunick talking about the burden of chronic hand eczema. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit DermConsult on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
