MedWire News: Italian study findings have confirmed a link between smoking habits and the risk of developing psoriasis.

Previous research has indicated that smoking significantly increases the risk of developing psoriasis, explains Giampiero Favato, from Henley Management College in the UK.

Hypothesizing that the incidence of smoking should therefore be significantly higher in psoriasis patients than in the general population, Favato studied data from the Italian PSOCARE research programme.

He looked at two cohorts of psoriasis patients enrolled in the open access PSOCARE observational study. The first cohort included 2368 patients who completed an 8-week follow-up period, the second comprised 2042 patients with 16 weeks of follow-up.

Lifestyle data revealed that the incidence of smoking in the first cohort was 41.0%, while that in the second cohort was 38.7%. These rates were almost double the age-standardized rate in the general Italian adult population, of 22.2%.

Favato notes in the American Journal of Medicine that the incidences of light, medium and heavy smoking were comparable in each of the two psoriasis cohorts studied, at about 16%, 20% and 5%, respectively.

He concludes: "Italian epidemiological data on adult psoriatic patients seem to confirm the correlation between smoking habits and the risk of developing the disease."

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