Obesity at an early age increases psoriatic arthritis risk—study

People who are obese by the age of 18 or earlier are more likely to develop the disease as compared to those with a normal weight.

The study, aimed at analyzing if excess weight and other risk factors were associated with the development of PsA, looked at 943 psoriasis patients.

Revelations of the study
Almost 250 participants in the cohort had PsA. The average age for the onset of psoriasis was 27.17 years, while the average age for the onset for arthritis was 37.09 years.

Skin symptoms appeared prior to arthritis in 78.9 percent of patients, while in 9.9 percent the joint manifestations were visible earlier.

In the rest 11.2 percent participants, both skin and joint manifestations appeared simultaneously.

Participants who were obese by 18 years of age were at a higher risk of suffering from severe skin diseases i.e. 56.8 percent for obese versus 46.6 percent for overweight versus 38.7 percent for normal weight.

"These data support a growing concept that patients more prone to PsA might benefit from more frequent and meticulous screening measures for early detection and treatment of PsA, i.e., before the development of irreversible joint destruction," the researchers observed.

Limitations of the study
Self-reporting of diagnosis of PsA and BMI at age 18, lack of information on disease’s severity, joints affected, and subclassification of PsA were few of the various limitations of the Utah psoriasis study.

"Importantly, the limitations of this study include the case definition of PsA, difficulty establishing a temporal relationship between the factors evaluated, and the lack of validation data on the accuracy of patient recall of BMI at age 18 years," wrote Alexis Ogdie, MD, and Joel M. Gelfand, MD, of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Clear identification of all the risk factors associated with PsA can lead to the ability to diagnose the disease and even prevent it, believe researchers.

The study was supported in part by the Utah Psoriasis Initiative and the Benning Foundation.