Atopic eczema/atopic dermatitis

Published on September 29, 2016   49 min

Other Talks in the Series: Allergy - From Basics to Clinic

Other Talks in the Series: Skin Biology

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0:00
Hello. I'm Michael Ardern-Jones. Associate Professor of Dermatology and Clinical Consultant Dermatologist at the University of Southampton. Today, I'm going talk to you about "Atopic Eczema". This title slide reminds me to emphasize that the term atopic eczema is synonymous with the term atopic dermatitis. The two are completely interchangeable. If I use atopic eczema throughout subsequent slides, then you could also replace that with atopic dermatitis.
0:28
Atopic eczema is one of a variety of different eczemas and I've listed here some different variants of eczema, which I'm not going to focus on in this presentation. Instead, I'm going to talk about atopic eczema, which is characterized by an itchy, chronically relapsing inflammatory skin condition. It is much more prevalent in childhood than in adulthood.
0:50
I'm going talk to you about epidemiology, diagnostic criteria and clinical features, co-morbidities, genetics, immunology, allergy, and current management. Then I'm going to move on to future management of the disease.
1:05
Epidemiology of atopic dermatitis has been studied for a long time, and one of the most important studies has been the International Study on Asthma and Allergies in Childhood, which looked at the prevalence of allergies including eczema in 106 countries. This study was able to undertake a global prevalence measurement of atopic eczema. You can see here that although there was a wide range of prevalence in atopic eczema in different countries, that actually this is a common disease in children. The UK, as you can see, lies at the upper end of the prevalence range, and this is reflected in the health demands in our country. A recent systematic review of prevalence studies has shown that lifetime prevalence of atopic eczema is approximately 20 percent in Western countries. This is in fact increasing year-on-year. A recent study looked at the prevalence in different age groups of children, and you can see here how the majority of atopic eczema arises in the first year of life. Adult atopic eczema is far less common and affects 1-3 percent of adults. Atopic eczema is important and it's been shown