Joint involvement in psoriasis

Joint Involvement in Psoriasis: Scintigraphic, Radiologic and Clinical Findings

“…Our patients in the Ps group were carefully selected with no history or signs of arthritis and carefully matched with the patients of the PA group. The latter criterion of selection is important as pathological accumulations appear in joints presenting no or minimal symptoms [3,4], findings confirmed in the present study. Blind interpretation of bone scintig raphy results is equally important, as the scintigraphic method is usually not quanti tative and relies on the visual evaluation of the examiner.…”

“…In accordance with other investigators, we found optimal radiographic examina tions insufficient as diagnostic tools for pso riatic arthritis [4,7,11], as changes were seen in only 2 patients of the PA group.…”

“…The discrepancy between the re ported findings and our results is not readily explained: Our patient material is small, but the 96% incidence of pathological scinti graphic findings observed in one report [3] should be reflected even in a small series. Further the extent of the psoriatic skin le sions in our patients was sparse, but Holzmann et al [3,4] found no correlation be tween the clinical extent or intensity of the skin lesions and scintigraphic accumula tions.…”

“…The intensity of arthritis is not corre lated to the severity of the skin manifesta tions and arthritis may precede the psoriatic skin lesions [2,5], Bone scintigraphy will reveal early arthritic changes, and scintigraphic accumu lations have been demonstrated in the arthritic joints of patients with psoriatic ar thritis [3,4,6,11]. Positive scintigrams, however, were found in several joints in pa tients with psoriasis who never had arthritis.…”

Functional Studies of Sessile Macrophages in Liver and Spleen of Psoriatics

“…Furthermore, one can assume blood monocytes to have an altered function as well in this group of psoriatics. In general, the sessile macrophage popu lations in liver and spleen reveal nearly the same functional abnormalities indicating ac tivation phenomena in the mononuclear phagocyte system in psoriatics as could be found in other cell systems, e.g., in epidermis and bone [9][10][11]. Finally, it is worthwhile that the extent of skin involvement does not correlate well with the increased activity of tissue-fixed macrophages.…”