Critical appraisal of studies involving skin microbiomes may lead to development of new treatments for skin diseases such as atopic dermatitis and psoriasis, according to David Sanchez, a student at Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and his associates at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York.
Studies involving atopic dermatitis underscore the importance of robust immune function for the skin’s ability to effectively balance transient microbial intruders and resident skin commensals in chronic inflammatory diseases.
While studies involving microbiota in psoriasis have delivered conflicting results, they may provide an impetus for researchers to standardize biopsies when obtaining human skin microbial samples. Some evidence has emerged linking psoriatic arthritis to an introduction of antibiotics into a population.
“Underscoring the current crisis involving antimicrobial resistance, filling the gaps in our knowledge base concerning the microbiome’s role in skin disease may ultimately help reduce antimicrobial use in exchange for agents that help manipulate the composition of a patient’s microbiome,” the investigators wrote. Read the article online at Journal of Drugs in Dermatology (2015;14:127-30).