MedWire News: Psoriasis patients may face an increased risk of death from cardiovascular causes, suggest study findings.

Psoriasis is known to be associated with cardiovascular disease, but these latest findings, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Investigative Dermatology in Montreal, Canada, suggest that it may also increase the risk of cardiovascular mortality independently of traditional cardiovascular risk factors.

Researcher Rahat Azfar, from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA, and colleagues used the General Practice Research Database to compare cardiovascular mortality in 3603 psoriasis patients and 14,330 individuals without the skin disease. The psoriasis patients all had severe disease, defined as receipt of a psoriasis diagnostic code and systemic therapy.

The researchers reviewed the medical records for causes of death. After taking into account traditional risk factors such as stroke, transient ischaemic attack, diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidaemia, age, gender, body mass index and smoking, patients with psoriasis were 1.55 times more likely than controls to die from cardiovascular causes.

The relative risk of cardiovascular death was modified by patient age, Azfar noted, with an excess risk of 5.78 cardiovascular deaths per 10,000 person years at age 40 years and 58.9 per 10,000 person years at age 60 years.

“Patients with psoriasis, especially if disease is severe , should be counselled about managing traditional cardiovascular risk factors as part of their routine care,” she concluded.

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