Psoriatic arthritis represents a chronic disorder for which skin inflammation (psoriasis) and also the inflammation of the joints (arthritis). Actually psoriasis is a skin disorder that affects 2 per cent of the Caucasian people in the US. The given disorder is often characterized by raised, patchy, red skin areas with scaling inflammation.
Psoriasis affects in most cases the elbow and knees tips, the navel, the scalp, around the anus and genital areas. About ten per cent of individuals who suffer from psoriasis can develop a related joints’ inflammation. Those people that suffer from psoriasis and inflammatory arthritis are generally diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis.
What is important is that the psoriatic arthritis onset can and do usually happens in the 4th or in the 5th life decades. We should also mention that men and women are equally affected by this disorder. Such skin disease as psoriasis and such joint disorder as arthritis generally show up separately. Actually the skin disorder occurs first and then it is followed by arthritis in approximately 80 per cent of people.
All in all arthritis might as well precede psoriasis in almost 15 per cent of individuals. There are some cases known when in some cases of this disorder, the correct and timely diagnosis of this psoriatic arthritis is difficult to be made especially if arthritis shows up first and then goes psoriasis. To make the correct diagnosis may take several years. Actually some individuals have suffered from arthritis for more than twenty years before such disorder as psoriasis occurs. And vice versa, people may suffer from psoriasis for more than twenty years before arthritis develops, and in such a way eventually psoriatic arthritis can be diagnosed.
Psoriatic arthritis actually represents a systemic rheumatic disorder which might as well provoke inflammation of the tissues found away from the body joints unlike the skin. These are in the lungs, heart, eyes as well as kidneys. All in all psoriatic arthritis has many common features with some other conditions of arthritis, like reactive arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, also arthritis attributed to Crohn’s disease as well as ulcerative colitis. These conditions evolve inflammation in the spinal cords and also other joints, the mouth, skin, eyes and different organs. In terms of the similarity and also tendency to provoke inflammation in the body spine, the following conditions are generally named spondyloarthropathies.