Psoriasis and Insulin Resistance,AMANY Z. EL-RAMLY, AMIRA M. EL-TAWDY, NOHA E.A. MOHAMED, AMAL M. EISSA, HANAA E. EMAM and OLFAT G. SHAKER
Abstract
Background: Psoriasis is a chronic and debilitating in-flammatory disease associated with serious co-morbidities, with increased prevalence of the metabolic syndrome, in which insulin resistance (IR) is often considered as its central component.
Objective: To detect IR and impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) in psoriatic patients who do not have clinical criteria of metabolic syndrome and their possible relation to the severity of the disease.
Methods: A prospective case-control study included 30 psoriatic patients with different severities and clinical variants, and 30 apparently healthy individuals were chosen as controls.
Results: Our results showed significant increase in the rates of IGT with decline in beta cell function and significant IR in psoriatic patients in comparison to controls with no significant correlation to severity of the disease measured by psoriasis area and severity index (PASI) score. Both fasting serum insulin and IR were higher in female cases with statis-tically significant difference when compared to males. This suggests that female psoriatic cases may carry high diabetes mellitus (DM) risk.
Conclusion: Psoriatic patients, in the absence of clinical criteria of metabolic syndrome show increased rates of both IR and IGT. Thus psoriasis as a disease entity has an association with IR and may be considered as a hallmark of IR. The detection of IR has an important value in reducing the risk of DM and prevents its complications and other components of insulin resistant syndrome (IRS) in psoriatic patients.