Medical Comorbidity Associated with Psoriasis in Adults: a Population-based Study

Background: Most publications to date on comorbidities associated with psoriasis have focused on cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Few comprehensive investigations of medical comorbidities in a cohort of patients with psoriasis appear in the literature.

Objectives: To examine the prevalence of comorbidities in adult patients with psoriasis, including a comparison of comorbid prevalence vs. that in controls without psoriasis, in a nationally representative dataset in Taiwan.

Methods: There were 1685 adult patients with psoriasis in the study group and 5055 randomly selected subjects in the comparison group. We used conditional logistic regression analyses to examine the risk of 29 comorbidities for these two groups after adjusting for monthly income, geographical region of residence and the level of urbanization of each patient's community of residence.

Results: After adjusting for several potential confounders, patients with psoriasis had higher odds of comorbid congestive heart failure [odds ratio (OR) 1·63], ischaemic heart disease (OR 1·51), renal failure (OR 1·45), uncomplicated diabetes (OR 1·37), liver diseases (OR 1·34), hepatitis B or C (OR 1·34), complicated diabetes (OR 1·32), hyperlipidaemia (OR 1·28), hypertension (OR 1·24) and peptic ulcer (OR 1·22) than did patients without psoriasis. However, patients with mild psoriasis had higher odds of comorbidity only with uncomplicated diabetes (OR 1·55), asthma (OR 1·30), liver diseases (OR 1·30) and peptic ulcer (OR 1·26) than patients without psoriasis.

Conclusions: We conclude that psoriasis is associated with a variety of medical comorbidities including cardiovascular diseases, metabolic diseases, renal failure, liver diseases, viral hepatitis B or C, asthma and peptic ulcers.