Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to DermConsult on ReachMD. On this episode, Dr. Tina Bhutani, Associate Adjunct Professor of Dermatology at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and owner of Synergy Dermatology, will explain why it’s important to treat generalized pustular psoriasis early. Let’s hear from her now.
Dr. Bhutani:
GPP, or generalized pustular psoriasis, which is the long term for it, is really one of the few true emergencies we have in dermatology. If we have a patient with GPP, if we leave them untreated, there are a few things that can potentially happen. One is the disease can take over large parts of their skin, and that can lead to what we call erythroderma. And when that happens, you're basically treating this patient like a burn patient. So they've lost the capacity of the skin to hold in water; they've lost the capacity of the skin to protect them from the outside environment. So now we're getting patients who are severely dehydrated. They're more at risk for developing skin infections and things like that.
The other thing that happens is all of the blood flow shunts to the skin, and then you can actually start to get end organ damage. So you can get heart failure and liver failure and other things happening because those organs are not getting enough blood flow because it's all going into the skin. So there's a lot of things that can happen, unfortunately, if GPP is not recognized early and if it's not treated immediately.
The other thing is the impact on the patients. Even if it's not severe, GPP is very painful. It's very uncomfortable and patients don't feel well. There are systemic symptoms. They're feeling fatigue and sometimes fevers, chills, joint pains. They just feel ill. So from a patient perspective, it's also very important to treat these patients quickly.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Tina Bhutani discussing the importance of early treatment for generalized pustular psoriasis. To access this and other episodes in this series, visit DermConsult on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
