“Hug me, psoriasis is not contagious”, with this slogan we commemorate this Friday, October 29, World Psoriasis Day, a chronic pathology associated with various comorbidities that requires a disciplinary approach and has an important impact on the quality of life and emotional health of the patient.
Monica de Chapman, president of the Psoriasis Foundation of Panama, stressed that this is not a cosmetic disease, it affects the immune system, since it does not work in the correct way and our cells begin to reproduce faster than they should, affecting the skin.
The cells of a person without psoriasis are renewed for 28 to 30 days and the cells of a person with psoriasis are renewed for 3 to 4 days, “which causes inflammation to occur in the body and then these cells accumulate in the surface of the skin forming red plaques that can then be seen as scaly ”.
There are different types of psoriasis, however, that inflammation that psoriasis produces can be triggered in the joints and can cause psoriatic arthritis, and this together with arthritis can trigger what we call “comorbidities”, that inflammation can also cause cardiovascular problems, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and it is very common to see pressure pictures accompanied by psoriasis.
Chapman stressed that this is a serious disease, but because it occurs on the skin, it creates a lot of rejection and stigmatization and discrimination must end. “This leads to depression in patients, people with psoriasis need affection,” he said.
He mentioned that psoriasis has many stages and can appear at any stage of life, it is a gene that a person may or may not have in their body and they can develop it as they cannot develop it; It can develop at 2 years and 98 years.
Some triggers of this disease can be trauma, an accident, a throat infection that appears for the first time. It can also be hereditary and there are people who cannot identify where the psoriasis has come from.
The president of the foundation commented that, in general, when psoriasis occurs as a child, it is more difficult to treat and will be more present in a greater percentage of the skin.
Psoriasis can be measured as mild, moderate, and extensive, depending on the percentage of skin it is covering. “If we talk about covering 2 to 5% we are talking about mild, if it covers more than 10% it is moderate, but there are people who have more than 80% of their body with psoriasis,” he said.
In Panama there are no accurate figures of how many people suffer from psoriasis, however, it is said that around 2% of the population worldwide has this disease, to which Chapman refers to that, if we take this average, we would be talking of more than 60 thousand people with psoriasis in Panama.
This disease has no cure, but there are treatments that keep the skin clean of lesions so that patients can have a better quality of life.
It should be noted that, for a decade, the Psoriasis Foundation of Panama has promoted the inclusion of drugs for these patients within the pharmacies of the Social Security Fund (CSS), but this has not been achieved.
The CSS and the Ministry of Health (Minsa) do not have the latest generation biologics that have come out to combat psoriasis, which have a high cost for these people.
