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Chronic Spontaneous Urticaria Learning Zone

Transcript: The role of comorbidities in CSU

Last updated: 24th Apr 2025
Published: 24th Apr 2025

Marcus Maurer, MD, and Petra Staubach-Renz, MD

All transcripts are created from interview footage and directly reflect the content of the interview at the time. The content is that of the speakers and is not adjusted by Medthority.

- Dermot has joined us. Thank you so much Dermot. That's fantastic. Offering family practitioners a look at this, and he's saying, should comorbidities be segregated by those which are associated with causation and that are consequent to CSU? Fantastic Dermot. This is exactly what we do because comorbidity is a very broad term. Basically it just means that it co-exists. It doesn't talk about causality or consequence. And we do see that some of the comorbidities, and this brings us to the third group now. Our consequences and that is depression, anxiety, panic disorder. These are comorbidities in the sense that there are consequences of the disease, never the other way around.

So yes, comorbidities can be consequences. I know of no comorbidity that is the cause. If a patient with CSU has Hashimoto, well that's because autoimmune diseases like to come in pairs or triplets. No, it's not that the Hashimoto cause the chronic spontaneous urticaria, they're both there. They may influence each other. They're both based on the same ability of the host to produce autoimmunity. And when we come to chronic inducible urticaria, okay, there are two urticarias in the same patient, but neither one of them is causing the other one. So if then we are talking about consequence rather than 'cause. Thank you very much Dermot for pushing that. Now I- - But Marcus, may I mention one thing?

- Sure, go ahead. - Because I think it's important at this point, therefore we need registries, which is this, where we can look for comorbidity. And in the follow-up, we can see maybe how we can get rid of those comorbidities. I think it's possible like depression or something like this if we help our patients to manage the urticaria. - Absolutely. - And this is really, really important to join this CURE programme. - Yes, please do that. We know from a fantastic work done in Korea, South Korea, that every year of having chronic spontaneous urticaria, uncontrolled chronic spontaneous urticaria, adds to the risk of developing anxiety, depression, or other psychological disorders. So let's not just look at the urticaria, but also the consequences that good treatment can contain.

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