VIDEO: Diagnostic process in atopic dermatitis

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So AD is typically characterized by red, very itchy skin. And because it's so itchy, there are often visible scratches on top of the active areas. So the rash can be limited to smaller areas of the skin and depending on the age, there are often specific sites of the body that have a predilection for AD, for example, the popliteal fossa, the interior elbows, in very young children often it occurs on the face, but it really can affect broad areas of the body. So there are some people with severe AD that are almost covered in these lesions.

So AD is extremely common in the U.S. So there are reports that suggest that up to 25% of children, so one in four children, are affected by AD. Even beyond that, something that we're coming to appreciate increasingly is it's actually also very common in adults. Up to 15% of adults may also be affected by AD and a pretty significant proportion of both populations can have moderate to severe AD, with those very itchy, widespread lesions.

So diagnosis of AD is currently made clinically. So for the most part, a patient comes in to the dermatologist's office and we examine the patient and can identify AD based on how it looks. There are diagnostic criteria, but in clinical practice for the most part, they aren't used in a rigorous sort of systematic way. In some cases where the rash may present a little less typically, biopsies can be useful for diagnosing the condition. The hope is that we move toward a system that actually incorporates biomarkers to give us more objective data for the diagnosis of the condition. We're not there yet and one of the challenges is that we need to collectively come up with non-invasive or minimally invasive biomarkers that can be used quickly and easily in the clinic. And we don't have those yet.