Advances in hidradenitis suppurativa
Transcript: HS diagnostic journey
Georgios Nikolakis
Interview recorded Sep 2024, EADV 2024. All transcripts are created from interview footage and directly reflect the content of the interview at the time. The content is that of the speaker and is not adjusted by Medthority.
There are several points which were, which were highlighted from this poster. What I would like to outline, what we have seen, both for European and US dermatologists, is the importance of education of physicians. Increased awareness is very important, but we have to accept that most of physicians which see these patients are very often not dermatologists or physicians whom maybe didn't have enough information on the disease. And this concerns also the surgeon, the gynaecologist, I find this very important, and this is maybe where strategically the awareness needs to be raised so that, you know, it's not just boils, it's not just inflammation, it's something more than that, and there's a treatment for that. Or it's not simply an infection that you cut and you do surgery every time a boil appears. Indeed, I don't find, concerning this data, I don't find wrong that we have a misdiagnosis of boils if this is early, because hidradenitis suppurativa is a chronic disease.
We need to have over six months recurrent typical lesions. So abscesses, inflammatory nodules, or draining tunnels for at least a minimum three times in order to, so I would consider the misdiagnosis only in the case that this time has already, this time period has passed and still the diagnosis wasn't, is not correct. So, yes. Concerning the second poster from the Greek study, what I find really important is that if you see in 2020, 21, we have a, what we wouldn't expect, a drop in the delay of diagnosis, which was the COVID era. One would expect that somebody doesn't have so much contact. But on the other hand, we have noticed that people were having more contact with, maybe were more on social media. They were trying to have awareness on the disease through other means. At the same time, it was a boom in publications and development of new biologics after eight years of having only one for the disease. And we have seen how important the raising of awareness is for the disease. So if we have at the same time an early treatment, an increased awareness to make patients go to the physician, the proper physician, which is the dermatologist, or at least in my opinion, I believe he needs to be the coordinator of this systematic effort, then we can reach results so that we, we might have a completely different landscape also for hidradenitis suppurativa, maybe similar to psoriasis. One is allowed to be optimistic about this.
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