Psoriasis and Diabetes

By now, I'm sure most of you have heard about the recent study that demonstrated that women with psoriasis are more likely to develop diabetes and hypertension (high blood pressure). If you haven't, here's a good article describing the study, and here's the link to the abstract on PubMed.

In short, scientists found that women with psoriasis first were 63% more likely to develop diabetes, and 17% more likely to develop high blood pressure. We've known already that individuals with psoriasis are more likely to have diabetes, but this study demonstrated that women with psoriasis are more likely to develop diabetes after developing psoriasis.

Here's what's not known from this study:

• Will anti-inflammatory medication, used to treat psoriasis, be more likely to control diabetes too?
  
• Is the same finding true for men?
• How does this finding relate to recent research demonstrating that people with psoriasis are also more likely to develop cardiac issues?
• Are people with diabetes first more likely to develop psoriasis?
• Are diabetes and psoriasis all just part of a larger systemic inflammatory (autoimmune?) disease?
  

This study makes me think that dermatologists' jobs may have just gotten harder. It also makes me think about how little my primary care doctors know about the relationships between all of these diseases...