Quarterly Newsletter - April 2024 - Issue No. 22

Professor Chris Griffiths
GPA Director

Director’s Foreword

Welcome to this Spring edition of the Global Psoriasis Atlas (GPA) newsletter. It is a time of renewal for the GPA as we say goodbye to Jade Kelly and Rebekah Swan as they move onto pastures new. I would like to thank both for their sterling work for the Atlas since the get-go, its success is in no small way down to them and we are sad to see them leave. We welcome new staff - Alice Silk who has joined us as our administrator and Paul Dimmock a new member of the research team – their profiles can be found elsewhere in the Newsletter. We also welcome Bryan Guevera a dermatologist from Manilla, Philippines who holds a prestigious International Psoriasis Council (IPC) Fellowship and has elected to work with the GPA on a survey on the lived experience of people with psoriasis in his home country. He will visit us in Manchester later in the year.

As always, the GPA has a multitude of activities ongoing. We have just returned from the annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) in San Diego where we ran the GPA Steering Committee and Funders Briefing and participated in the GPA Board of Governors and ILDS Grand Challenges in Skin Health atlases meetings. We are forming strong, strategic links with colleagues in the three other ILDS atlases namely atopic dermatitis, vitiligo and hidradenitis suppurativa. We are particularly pleased to have been involved in the recently published systematic review on vitiligo, led by Professor Khaled Ezzedine (Paris), in Lancet Public Health. I attended the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva as part of the ILDS WHO Committee in March where we had a positive meeting with the Non-Communicable Disease team led by Guy Fones. We have undertaken to write a joint atlases article about the burden of inflammatory skin disease and are delighted to be doing this with Global Skin who will make sure the patient voice is heard.

We are still basking in the success of the SKINSCAPE mission to Eastern Cape and are preparing abstracts for presentation and a paper for publication. Whisper it quietly, but we are in advanced planning for a field survey to India at the end of this year and are hopeful that this will materialise. More information to follow…

Enjoy the Spring weather, wherever you are, and thank you for your support.

With my best wishes,
Chris Griffiths

Professor Darren Ashcroft
GPA Research Director

It was a pleasure to meet face-to-face with so many of our collaborators recently at the 2024 American Academy of Dermatology (AAD) Annual Meeting in San Diego. We are very grateful for the help and support they provide in driving forward our ambitious research programme. At the Congress, we also met with Dr Bryan Guevara from the Southern Philippines Medical Center who we are delighted to host this year as an International Psoriasis Council (IPC) Fellow in collaboration with the Global Psoriasis Atlas. Bryan will be conducting a survey to examine the lived experience of people with psoriasis in the Philippines and will be spending time at the GPA headquarters later this year.

Alongside this, we have had some new papers published since my last research update, including our findings examining risk factors that are associated with the incidence of psoriasis at the neighborhood level using populational data from the province of Quebec (Canada): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40257-024-00854-3. This is the first study to highlight highly variable psoriasis incidence rates on a jurisdictional level and suggests that living environment, notably climate, vegetation, urbanisation and neighbourhood socioeconomic characteristics may have an association with psoriasis incidence. We continue to work very closely with Professor Wayne Gulliver (our Regional Coordinator for North America) and look forward to presenting new findings from a cohort study examining the epidemiology of psoriasis in Newfoundland soon too.

Finally, we were delighted to support our friends who have recently established the Global Vitiligo Atlas, and using the methods that we developed for the Global Psorais Atlas, we have recently published a global review of the epidemiology of vitiligo in the Lancet Public Health: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(24)00026-4/fulltext

We are excited to welcome Dr Paul Dimmock to the GPA team.

Dr Dimmock and Dr Ahmad Aalemi are working together to update our GPA systematic review of the worldwide epidemiology of psoriasis.

Dr Dimmock originally worked as an academic scientist in chemistry in the UK and US, later moving into medical research, focussing on systematic reviews and meta-analysis. He has most recently worked at NICE on clinical and cost effectiveness of innovative medical technologies.

Paul worked with Prof Ashcroft many years ago on a dermatology review and has returned to work with him at the GPA.

Alice joined the GPA in February as our new Administrator.

Alice has worked previously as a Business Administrator for a corporate law firm, an Administrator at the General Medical Council and a Business Travel Consultant at a corporate travel agency.

Alice looks forward to working with the GPA team during Phase III of their research.

The GPA welcomes Dr Bryan Ko Guevara as this year’s IPC Fellow.

Dr. Guevara is actively participating in different clinical trials and research on psoriasis, including clinical trials on generalized pustular psoriasis.

Dr. Bryan Ko Guevara is a board-certified dermatologist and dermatopathologist of the Southern Philippines Medical Center (government hospital) and Southeast Dermatology (private practice). He is active in research and publications, with editorial positions in local and international journals. Dr. Guevara was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Philippine Dermatological Society (JPDS) and is currently an associate editor of the Australasian Journal of Dermatology. He is also the chair of the Philippine Dermatological Society (PDS) research committee and co-chair of the PDS immuno-dermatology subspecialty core group.

He works closely with Psoriasis Philippines (PsorPhil), the leading national advocacy and support group for patients living with psoriasis.

Prof Lars French and Prof Chris Griffiths at the World Health Organization (WHO), March 2024

Louise Topping from Janssen and Elsa Taicher from L’Oreal at the AAD 2024

It has been a busy year of projects for the Global Psoriasis Atlas with changes and additions to the GPA team. The GPA Annual Report 2023-2024 will be published soon. The report will show what we have accomplished in 2023 and what we have planned for 2024 and beyond.