Women with Psoriasis More Likely to Get Crohn's Disease

A new study found that female psoriasis patients have a fourfold increased risk of developing Crohn’s disease (CD).   However, the researchers did reveal there was no causal relationship between psoriasis and ulcerative colitis (UC).   To investigate whether inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) was associated with specific psoriasis phenotypes, the researchers analyzed health records of 174,646 participants from the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) and NHS II. The team found 4,400 cases of psoriasis in the combined studies.   “Certainly, this is a preliminary study, but it does begin to make sense because we are seeing patients with Crohn’s disease and psoriasis overlap. The inflammatory pathways that have been identified at the genetic level in genome-wide association studies makes sense as well, because there is overlap in the interleukin-12 and interleukin-23 pathways in psoriasis and Crohn’s disease,” said Abrar A. Qureshi, MD, Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.   The results had found, 423 participants had developed CD or UC, and the prevalence of psoriasis was four to six times greater in IBD patients than the estimated prevalence in the general public.   Furthermore, the authors had concluded the psoriasis-screening tool was a useful tool in identifying psoriasis in a population of patients in an IBD clinic.