Alopecia Areata: Progressing Practice
Transcript: Unmet needs in AA treatment
Brett King, MD, PhD
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The burden of alopecia areata is often quite significant and for sure, right? I don't wanna speak for all patients and say that, you know, the quality of life impact is dramatic and negative but I do believe that this is often true, in particular for patients with more severe hair loss. But also, I just want to point out, we should never dismiss anybody's experience, even the patients who have very limited hair loss from alopecia areata. Remember, the unpredictability of this disease really makes it challenging for some patients day-to-day. Imagine not knowing whether tomorrow you're going to wake up missing an eyebrow, right? That's really significant. Imagine having a beard and not knowing if you're going to wake up tomorrow missing part of your beard.
These are experiences that are dramatic. They can't be hidden, they can't be disguised. And so the negative impact on quality of life should not surprise any of us. And so really, the advances that we're making in understanding disease, the advances that we're making in treatment of disease are really important because they impact our ability as dermatologists to reverse this significant impact on quality of life. It permits us to reverse the psychological burden of this disease on our patients. And one of the things that's really exciting and it's kind of a nice lead-in to the rest of our discussion, we're beginning to see data from big clinical trials in alopecia areata showing that we can impact quality of life when we erase the disease in patients.
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