Who is affected by Psoriatic Arthritis?

Psoriatic arthritis is one of the autoimmune arthritis diseases that affect the joints. It might not be as so common, so famous as rheumatoid arthritis but still, it is not so uncommon at all. We see psoriatic arthritis patients in our clinics every week.

Psoriatic arthritis affects both men and women equally. It occurs in 20 percent of patients who have psoriasis. When we use the term psoriasis, we mean patients who have either psoriasis of the skin or the scalp or the nails. At the same time, psoriatic arthritis is more likely to happen over the years in patients who already have psoriasis. Over 30 years of follow up in patients with psoriasis, more than 25 percent of those patients will develop psoriatic arthritis.

In most patients with psoriatic arthritis, there is psoriasis also from the start, meaning those patients already have psoriasis of the skin or scalp or nail from the start, before they got psoriatic arthritis, on the average 8 years before they got psoriatic arthritis.

In a small percent of patients, the psoriasis and the psoriatic arthritis happen at the same time or the psoriatic arthritis happens even before the psoriasis. In those patients, with more meticulous examination, we might find psoriasis lesions of the skin that were missed and undiagnosed as they were so mild.

Lastly, in patients who have both psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, we cannot say there is a strong relationship between the severity of the skin psoriasis and the psoriatic arthritis. One of them can be quite severe while at the same time the other can be quite mild.

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This post was prepared and published by  Dr. Hatem Eleishi. Dr. Hatem Eleishi is a professor of rheumatology at Cairo university (Egypt) and is especially dedicated to supporting arthritis patients with online educational videos and articles about arthritis causes and treatment. He also runs a rheumatology clinic in Cairo and a center for online medical consultations that, in addition to providing online rheumatology consultations, also provides online medical consultations in several different medical specialties by expert consultants from Egypt, Canada and the United States.

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To watch the educational videos of Dr. Hatem on his you tube (Dr. Hatem Eleishi Arthritis channel), kindly click here