Atopic dermatitis not positively related to cardiovascular diseases: Study

People having atopic dermatitis, a common form of eczema, can relax as a recent study has raised doubts about the skin condition endangering hearts. According to the latest study, despite recent findings to the contrary, the skin condition is likely not related to an increase in cardiovascular risk factors or diseases.

“In our study, people who reported having atopic dermatitis were not at any increased risk for high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, heart attacks or strokes,” said lead author Aaron Drucker of Brown University.

Drucker and a team of co-authors made the revelations by examining the records of 259,119 adults aged 30-74 in the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project. Drucker led the data analysis with the hypothesis, suggested by two recent studies, that people with atopic dermatitis (AD) would be considerably prone to different cardiovascular problems.

Instead, he found evidence to the contrary.A diagnosis of AD was linked with somewhat lesser risk of stroke (0.79 times the odds), hypertension (0.87 times), diabetes (0.78 times) and heart attack (0.87 times). 

Drucker stressed that, however, that he does not believe that AD is protects — given the mixed evidence gathered by researchers, the best answer is that AD is likely not positively related with cardiovascular disease.

“It’s important to make this clear so it doesn’t get misinterpreted: Even though we found lower rates of these outcomes with atopic dermatitis, we are not interpreting that as atopic dermatitis decreasing the risk,” he said.

The findings are based on a statistical analysis that accounted for factors such as gender, ethnic background, body-mass index, smoking, alcohol consumption, sleep, physical activity and asthma. The findings have been published in the British Journal of Dermatology.