Barriers to an Accurate Diagnosis of Psoriatic Arthritis

With an estimated one-third of patients with psoriasis concurrently having psoriatic arthritis (PsA), Abby Van Voorhees, MD, shares what to know about PsA and psoriasis in this latest video from our Expert Insights series.

Dr Van Voorhees is professor and chair of dermatology at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, VA. She is chair emeritus and a member of the National Psoriasis Foundation Medical Board.

Transcript
Dr Van Voorhees: The trickiest part, I think, is determining whether patients have psoriatic arthritis. Obviously, patients have come into our offices with various complaints. Sometimes, they tell us that their joints hurt, but it's hard to know whether that knee pain that they're experiencing is a result of a prior football injury they had when they were 20 or whether it may represent psoriatic arthritis. 

One of the biggest problems we have in the area of psoriatic disease is that there's no formal test. I am really happy to tell you that the National Psoriasis Foundation has invested a huge amount of research dollars in trying to develop a tool that will enable us to have a more definitive test.

This diagnostic test grant that's gone out has already gone through. I think it's about a year and a half of funding, and there are multiple groups working on developing various tools. Hopefully, one of them will move forward in a very positive way.

It would help us all if there were some kind of definitive testing tool where we could say to patients, "Aha, you do have early psoriatic arthritis," or "No, this doesn't look like that at all, but rather this is probably a little osteoarthritis, or fibromyalgia, or some other kind of discomfort that needs to be addressed in a different way."

I'm very excited about that, and I'm really hoping that this funding effort will result in a highly rewarding product, so I'm looking forward to it.