VIDEO: Racial, gender disparities in psoriasis care

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There are really tons of racial disparities, and this is an area that also deserves a lot more investigation. Only recently has this become a bigger topic of conversation. With gender, there's probably less of a difference. I mean, men tend to have worse psoriasis by and large than women. But as far as access to care and treatment with biologics, there's no consistent trends that are seen.

There's a lot of variability based on the population. And for racial disparities that has been well documented that people with skin of color, namely African-American populations, lower access to biologics, they tend to receive biologics less often, they tend to have worse disease, and there tends to be a higher stigma on psoriasis in African-American communities. And this is multifactorial, but the result is that people with skin of color tend to get less treatment, whether they have less access or less likely to see a specialist and they're more significantly affected by the disease.

So getting biologic treatment and the standard of care out to patients of all races is really also an unmet need in the treatment of psoriasis. And also there's representation in clinical trials is a huge problem. People with skin of color are really heavily underrepresented in clinical trials with very few exceptions. So that's an area that really needs to be further explored as far as are certain biologics better and certain ethnicities. So yeah, it's an area we know exists and I think it's maybe more marketing towards those populations, more clinical trials and better access, that hopefully will improve over time.