June is Hidradenitis Suppurativa Awareness Week

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I am a psoriasis expert. It used to be a difficult condition to manage. Treatments were helpful but not highly effective, and negative side effects limited the doses we could use. Patients needed a lot of psychosocial support even after treatment given the impact of residual disease on their lives. Oh, how all that has changed! Over the past 30 years, we have had one advance after another in psoriasis treatment. Now I have an easy job. We have an array of very safe treatments that are remarkably effective at controlling psoriasis. Aside from a permanent cure, I am not sure that there is much room left for improvement.

Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) is altogether another story. While psoriasis has a huge impact on patients’ lives, the impact of HS is, on average, so much worse. Despite the approval of a few new treatments, HS remains an area with huge unmet need; there is a lot of ongoing, promising research for better HS treatments.

The first week of June is HS Awareness Week and this month, we feature a discussion on HS with Dr Alexandra Charrow, who describes what is new with medical and surgical treatments and what is coming. Because the treatments we have are not as effective for HS as what we have for psoriasis, she also describes many adjunctive lifestyle modifications that can be done for our patients with HS.

Being an HS expert right now is a good place for career development ( just as being a psoriasis expert was 30 years ago), but they do face big challenges. Patients can have a lot of psoriasis for a long time and the skin can clear completely with effective treatment, although there may be an irreversible impact on some patients’ lives. HS, even if treated so well that all the inflammation is gone, can result in permanent scarring and disability. Early treatment, before irreversible changes occur, is essential to minimize the long-term impact of HS on patients’ lives. Hopefully, we will see the day when we can offer patients with HS the same level of success we now offer our patients with psoriasis.