Dermatology News

A 10-year-old boy presented last summer with several swollen lymph nodes in his left inguinal and left upper chest, along with sores on his abdomen and lower left chest. The sores were first thought to be poison ivy that he had acquired while clearing weeds from his grandmother’s rose garden 1 month earlier, and indeed, there were some lesions on his arm that were described as inflamed vesicular lesions that cleared with some topical steroid cream.

For years, people in a remote high-altitude area of Western Uganda suffered from bouts of itching, pain and swelling in their lower limbs and feet with no explanation and no available treatment. After an apparent sudden outbreak of potentially debilitating elephantiasis struck in the region in 2015, local health officials ruled out the usual cause — parasitic filarial worms — as an explanation. Eventually, investigators from the Ugandan Ministry of Health, WHO and the CDC solved both mysteries after interviewing dozens of patients from Kamwenge District and learning they were predominantly farmers who regularly worked barefoot.

Antibiotics demonstrated no clinically meaningful benefit for treating clinically infected eczema when compared to topical corticosteroids and emollient treatment, according to research recently published in the Annals of Family Medicine.

ORLANDO, Fla. — In a video perspective from the American Academy of Dermatology Annual Meeting, Junko Takeshita, MD, PhD, discusses her late-breaking research presentation on racial and ethnic disparities in health care utilization and school attendance among children with atopic dermatitis.

The European Commission has approved Amgevita, a biosimilar to adalimumab, for the treatment of moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, severe active ankylosing spondylitis, severe axial spondyloarthritis without radiographic evidence of ankylosing spondylitis in addition to moderate to severe chronic plaque psoriasis, moderate-to-severe hidradenitis suppurativa, non-infectious intermediate, posterior and panuveitis, moderate to severe Crohn’s disease and moderate to severe ulcerative colitis. It is also approved for Crohn’s disease in children aged 6 years and older, severe chronic plaque psoriasis in children aged 4 years and older, enthesitis-related arthritis in children aged 6 years and older and polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis in children aged 2 years and older.

Compared with standard of care, once-daily daptomycin, a parenteral lipopeptide antibiotic, demonstrated significant effectiveness and safety for the treatment of complicated skin and skin structure infections caused by gram-positive pathogens, including community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

A 16-year-old boy presents to his primary care office in the month of January with 5 days of fever, chills, headache and myalgia, with no nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cough, congestion, rash or other complaints — only fever. Further history revealed that the patient emigrated from Nigeria, Western Africa 2 1/2 weeks earlier, which was about 2 weeks before the onset of his illness.

BPX-101, a novel topical gel formulation of minocycline, may deliver the medication to target areas of acne without side effects, according to a poster presentation at the American Academy of Dermatology Annual Meeting in Orlando, Fla.

Surgical removal of some infant hemangiomas may be considered instead of observation or therapeutic management.

Patients treated with propranolol for infantile hemangioma did not face an increased risk for psychological problems at age 7, according to study results recently published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.