Sleepless atopic dermatitis due to itchiness, ‘this method’ will know in advance at 2 months of age[헬시타임] : Seoul Economic Daily

Atopic dermatitis is a relatively common disease that affects nearly 1 million people in Korea. It is easy to get worse during the changing seasons, when the temperature difference between day and night is wide, and it is painful for parents to see a child scratching so much that itches and bleeds. A method has been developed to determine the risk of developing atopic dermatitis before symptoms appear in newborns at 2 months of age.

A joint research team led by Kang-Mo Ahn and Ji-Hyun Kim, professors of the Department of Pediatrics at Samsung Seoul Hospital, and Donald Leung and Yevgeny Verdiseff, professors at National Jewish Health, USA, discovered atopic dermatitis-related skin lipid biomarkers for the first time in the world, and found atopic dermatitis before the age of 2. announced on the 2nd that it has announced a model that can predict early onset of the disease at 2 months after birth.

The research team took the stratum corneum of the skin with tape from the arms of 111 2-month-old infants with no skin abnormalities, analyzed the skin lipid composition and cytokines (proteins involved in the transmission of information between cells), and followed up until 24 months of age. As a result, it was observed that skin lipid composition and cytokine changes in the skin were already occurring at 2 months of age, before atopic dermatitis occurred. In particular, it was found that the possibility of atopic dermatitis increased up to 54 times when there was a family history of allergy, high levels of ‘interleukin-13′ and ’26:1 unsaturated sphingomyelin’ and low ‘protein-binding ceramide’ in the skin. The research team explains that by combining and analyzing family history, changes in skin lipids, and cytokine expression through a simple method of collecting stratum corneum, the predictive power of future atopic dermatitis can be dramatically improved.

Professor Ahn Kang-mo said, “Predicting the onset of atopic dermatitis before symptoms appear can reduce the patient’s pain and medical burden through early intervention.” We hope to be able to open it,” he said. This study was conducted with the support of the Ministry of Environment and the Korea Environmental Industry and Technology Institute, and was published in the latest issue of the International Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.