Could shedding extra pounds improve psoriasis?

By Genevra Pittman

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Losing weight may ease psoriasis and improve quality of life for some overweight people with the chronic skin disease, new research from Denmark suggests.

But the trial may have been too small to fully flesh out that link, and researchers said future studies will have to follow larger groups of patients for more time to make definitive conclusions.

"The results, I would say, are promising," said Dr. Joel Gelfand, a dermatologist from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia.

"It's still excellent advice to patients who are overweight with psoriasis to lose weight."

According to the National Institutes of Health, more than three percent of U.S. adults have psoriasis, which is characterized by itchy, painful plaques on the skin.

Over the years, researchers have learned that obese people are more likely to develop psoriasis than their thinner peers and tend to have more severe disease. That could be due to more body-wide inflammation among people carrying around extra fat.

"It's more than one thing that causes it, but obesity is probably one of the factors that can bring on psoriasis," Gelfand, who wasn't involved in the new study, told Reuters Health. Genetics also plays a role.

Conversely, Gelfand said there's been some suggestion that losing weight may ease psoriasis symptoms, based on reports of people who had bariatric surgery and saw their skin condition improve.

For the new study, researchers led by Dr. Peter Jensen from Copenhagen University Hospital Gentofte wanted to shed more light on how weight loss influences psoriasis.

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Could shedding extra pounds improve psoriasis?