Comorbidities in Psoriasis, Cross-Sectional Study in Western Nepal

Abstract

Introduction: Psoriasis is an immune mediated chronic inflammatory disorder with a worldwide prevalence of 0.5 to 11%. Prevalence of psoriasis in Nepal is around 3%. Psoriasis has many associated systemic diseases and conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, hypothyroidism, of which the commonly associated condition is Metabolic syndrome. The objective of this study is to find the degree of association between psoriasis and other diseases such as hypothyroidism metabolic syndrome etc.

Materials and Methods: For this study, total number of fifty-two patients with equal number of age and sex matched controls were recruited with a total duration of study being six months. This is an observational cross sectional prospective study. For the qualitative data, Chi-square test was used and for quantitative data analysis Student’s t test was used. 

Results: Out of the eight parameters [BMI,  smoking,  alcohol use, hypothyroidism, hypertension, fasting blood sugar(FBS),fasting triglyceride(TG), fasting high density lipoprotein] considering the p value of <0.05 to be significant, FBS & fasting TG were found to be significant. When the means of FBS and fasting TG were compared between the cases and controls, there was notable relationship between the difference of means and the standard errors of means (p value=0.01 for FBS and p value=0.017 for fasting TG) as calculated by Student’s t Test.

Conclusion: In this study, there was a statistical significance between the fasting blood sugar(FBS) levels of the cases and controls (p value=0.01) and also between the fasting triglyceride levels of cases and controls (p value=0.017).