Incidence of type D personality was significantly more common in patients with moderate to severe psoriasis, compared with a healthy control group, according to Dr. Alejandro Molina-Leyva of Hospital Torrecardenas, Almeria, Spain, and his associates.
People with type D, or distressed, personality tend to be more worried and irritable, and tend to display more negative emotions than do others. Of the 90 patients with moderate to severe psoriasis included in the study, 39% had type D personality, compared with 24% of the 82 members of the control group. The odds ratio for psoriasis patients developing type D personality was 2.1.
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Psoriasis patients with type D personalities had significantly worse general, sexual, and psoriasis-related health-related quality of life, compared with psoriasis patients without type D personality. In addition, type D personality psoriasis patients were much more likely to experience anxiety or depression than were healthy people with type D personality, with an OR of 3.2.
“It may be that the higher prevalence of type D personality in moderate to severe psoriasis is, at least in part, the result of accumulated psychic damage over years of evolution of the disease. It is important to conduct prospective studies with incident cases of psoriasis to clarify the relationship between type D personality and psoriasis,” the investigators noted.
Find the full study here in the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (doi: 10.1111/jdv.12960).