VIDEO: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on psoriasis care

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COVID-19 has had an effect on how we care for our patients with psoriasis. And it has been a challenge in a number of different ways, but also I think during this experience, we also learned valuable lessons about how we can care better for patients with psoriasis.

Number one is really concerning process of care. And what I mean by that is that, for a very long time, often times the care for psoriasis patients occurred face-to-face in the doctor's office. And what we learned, especially in the beginning of the pandemic, when patients are very reluctant to go to hospital what we noticed is that sometimes we can actually provide care to our patients via online modalities pretty effectively. So telemedicine, or teledermatology, has really proven to be one of the models of care during the COVID pandemic, where we can still continue to care for our patients remotely. In addition to that, we also learned a lot about psoriasis patients, how psoriasis response to, for example, to COVID-19 infections, and the care of patients with COVID-19 infections who also concurrently have psoriasis.

The National Psoriasis Foundation has a COVID-19 task force that answers a lot of the common questions regarding COVID-19 infection in psoriasis patients. And I'm really proud to be a part of that task force. Several lessons that we've learned from looking at the literature and studies that are focusing this psoriasis population is that, number one, having psoriasis by itself does not increase one's risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2, or have worse outcome of COVID-19 infection. Then the other important lesson that we learned is that most therapies that patients use for psoriasis can be continued safely, especially in those who do not have COVID-19 infection or those who may be mildly or completely asymptomatic. So there was a lot of controversy and discussion around, especially our systemic therapies.

And what we learned to date is that if a patient, for example, does not have COVID-19, it's okay to initiate those systemic therapies and continue those patients on the systemic therapies. For patients who do experience severe COVID-19 infection, for example, then they need to talk to a provider to decide if they need to discontinue their systemic therapy. The last lesson that we learned is around vaccinations.

We understand that in the psoriasis population specifically, that it's important to receive vaccinations against COVID-19 regardless of your severity, and also regardless of the type of medication that you are receiving. And I know currently we're having a lot of conversations regarding the third dose, and we're learning more about how that affects the psoriasis patient population. But I want to point out that the National Psoriasis Foundation online has the up-to-date recommendations from the taskforce where we have evaluated the literature and especially those pertaining to the psoriasis patients and can provide the latest updates to the recommendations for this important topic.