VIDEO: Awareness of disease, understanding medication choices key in atopic dermatitis

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript, which has been slightly edited for clarity. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Awareness is always critically important for anybody surrounding an affected individual as well as that individual because you really have to understand the disease and understand some of the ramifications of having the disease. Of course, for patients themselves really having a better idea of what's going on and why you've chosen a particular medication, how it works — all that kind of education is an important part of management. If you understand the disease better and why you're using a medication, you're more likely to adhere to the medication as prescribed.

For the parents, of course, understanding the disease and the awareness by people around you is critically important. For example, parents have to understand the disease and not just why they're treating it in a certain way … but what to expect and what are some of the other risks. What are the comorbidities? What is going to come up down the road if they don't treat appropriately? What do they do after the initial response? Awareness of disease, but also awareness and better understanding of why we do what we do and how to make change, that's going to be best for the affected individual. Really important in terms of just public awareness is the fact that patients don't exist in a bubble. They are in an environment with a lot of people who aren't invested in knowing about the disease but who need to understand enough about the disease to be able to empathize to be able to get a better sense of what a patient, whether it's an adult or a child, is going through and potentially to accommodate to that.

So, we know that children who experience atopic dermatitis have serious issues with stigma and that these issues with stigma can translate into anxiety, depression or relationships with others who surround them. There's bullying. There's just difficulty to engage whether that's not being able to do sports because when they get hot, they get itchy, they get miserable, or maybe they're uncomfortable because the skin is cracked and it's painful. That means that that social opportunity they may shy away from because they don't want to be seen in a bathing suit at the pool party when they’re covered with lesions or they sit there in school scratching all the time and that itch, that scratch is something that others notice. It becomes a focal point for bullying, for stigma, for being different from other children. And teachers for example, or other adults are very important in knowing how to intervene and knowing how to help affected individuals. Same thing in a work environment for adults.