GRAPPA is not a wine, it’s about psoriasis!

A/Prof. Pablo Fernandez-Peñas was invited to the GRAPPA 2016 Psoriatic Diseases Asian Summit in Seoul (South Korea). GRAPPA is the Group for Research and Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis. From its website “GRAPPA is organized exclusively for non-profit, educational, and scientific purposes, specifically to facilitate sharing of information related to psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis, networking among different medical disciplines that see psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis patients and to enhance research, diagnosis and treatment of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis”.
In this meeting, dermatologists and rheumatologists from several asian countries (including Hong-Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam) and Australia attended a 2-day conference focused in enhancing the collaboration between rheumatologists and dermatologists in the treatment of patients with psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis.
Pablo reviewed the state of the art in cutaneous psoriasis treatment, answered rheumatologists questions about diagnosis and treatment of skin psoriasis during a 45 min workshop session, and showed rheumatologists how dermatologists perform an skin examination and PASI/NAPSI scores with a real patient in another 45 min workshop session.
In the conference, we reviewed the changing goals in psoriatic treatment, the possible use of “treating to target” in dermatology learning from the experience in rheumatology, how to assess psoriatic arthritis in the dermatology clinic (is inflammatory arthritis or just osteoarthritis?), and highlighted the importance of measuring outcomes.
The interaction between dermatologists and rheumatologists was great, and the open environment allowed for good interesting and thought provoking discussions.