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Underrepresentation of Geriatric Patients in Dermatologic Research
In this video, Janell Tully, BS, discusses the underrepresentation of geriatric patients within the dermatological clinic and how older adults are often left out of research and clinical trials.
Transcript
Janell Tully: Hi. My name is Janell Tully, and I'm a fourth-year medical student at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, and I'm also a geriatric dermatology research fellow at the University of California-San Francisco. Well, my mentor, Daniel Butler, is a dermatologist at UCSF, and under his guidance, have really focused on geriatric dermatology. Sometimes, we get laughs about that because people are like, "Oh, in dermatology, most of our patients are older, so isn't that all of dermatology?"
But what we see is that older adults are often underrepresented in the way clinics are designed, and how they flow into the research that we do, and are often excluded from clinical trials. So, when we had this patient present to us with a very medically complex case, as well as a socially complex individual in the setting of multiple comorbidities, we thought... although much more complex than a typical day-to-day older adult that you would see in clinic, he highlights several key aspects about geriatric dermatology that is our main focus, which is to increase the representation of older adults, all the way from research to the way clinics are designed.
