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 Give, but with your eyes open | Back to blogs for industry | An animal model for psoriasis? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
We watched Fantastic Four on DVD yesterday. Fantastic Four(FF) may have been the first Marvel comic I was introduced to by a new kid in the neighborhood. I honestly don't recall if it was FF, X-men, or Spider-Man...I probably sat down with a pile of comics and devoured them all. Reading these books in the mid-1960s was a revelation after the DC standards. Wikipedia describes what many have noted about Marvel Marvel's comics were noted for focusing on characterization to a greater extent than most superhero comics before them — Spider-Man in particular, its young hero suffering from self-doubt and mundane problems like any other teenager. Marvel superheroes are often flawed, freaks, and misfits, unlike the perfect, handsome, athletic heroes found in previous traditional comic books. Some of the Marvel heroes looked like villains and monsters. In time, this non-traditional approach would revolutionize comic books.The FF character who epitomized this is Ben Grimm, aka the Thing, who has to learn to live with the sudden onset of a deformed appearance. It was an odd coincidence to watch the movie deal with this right after this news story about psoriasis and smoking came out. ...researchers found that people with psoriasis were more likely to smoke and also more likely to be obese. However, patients tended to start smoking and gain weight after they developed the condition, the researchers reported.Psoriasis is an unpleasant but generally not physically debilitating disease. I've had psoriasis for more years than I can recall...at least since being a teenager reading Marvel comics. Typical psoriasis involves some rather unattractive plaques that can appear anywhere, but tend to show up on the elbows, knees, forearms, legs, and scalp. Some authors who had psoriasis include John Updike, who wrote about it in "At war with my skin" (part of this memoir) and Vladimir Nabokov, and Dennis Potter, who made the film The Singing Detective. This 1997 review of psoriasis in literature writes: All aspects known from medical literature are also found in non-medical literature. Patients subject themselves to a deliberate seclusion and keep psoriasis as a secret or at least hide it. In this hiding place Peter Caldwell cherishes his daydreams. In the case of Leo Brodsky these innocent daydreams have developed into sexual fantasies, while in The Singing Detective, they become veritable hallucinations of the protagonist Philip Marlow.In this context, it is not surprising that it is difficult to separate causes and effects in the observation that psoriasis sufferers are more likely than the general population to be obese or to smoke. [Utah Dermatology Prof. Gerald] Krueger and his colleagues originally thought that obesity was one of the causes of psoriasis. "That's not the case," he said. "What happens is that psoriasis develops and then obesity develops as a consequence."Psoriasis is, of course, hardly unique in raising these questions.
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