Serum Leptin Level among School Children with Atopic Dermatitis

Abstract

Background: Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory skin condition. The pathogenesis of AD is still not fully understood. The association between obesity and AD suggests a potential role for adipocytes hormones, mainly leptin, which had variable immunological functions.

The pattern of atopic dermatitis in a group of patients attending two private clinics in Erbil city

“…These results were consistent with those of a case-control study conducted in Egypt, which revealed that the serum leptin level was significantly elevated among cases than healthy controls. 17 In contrast, a study conducted by Nagel et al revealed no significant associations between high leptin levels and the prevalence of the symptoms of atopic dermatitis. 18 On another hand, our study also showed that there is a significant association between high leptin level and high IgE level since 75.6% of the patients who had high leptin level also had a high IgE level.…”

Possible Role of Leptin in Atopic Dermatitis: A Literature Review

“…High leptin levels were found by Kimata (2002,2006) in children with IgE-associated AD, especially in those with fatty liver [ 72 , 75 ]. Another study also showed high leptin in AD children, mainly in girls [ 81 ]. In addition, teenagers, and adults with AD, both with normal and high BMI had high leptin concentrations compared with controls [ 83 ].…”

“…Jaworek et al (2020) reported similar results, but leptin was not correlated with AD severity, sex, age or BMI [ 68 ]. By contrast, low leptin levels were significantly found in lactating adult women with AD compared with their healthy counterparts [ 81 ], as well as in AD children, in which leptin was inversely associated with the severity of AD [ 79 ]. Nonetheless, other studies did not show a relationship between this skin disease and leptin in neither children [ 74 ] nor teenagers and adults [ 77 ].…”

“…AD has been classically distinguished into extrinsic and intrinsic types, clinically identical entities but differing each other in the concentration of IgE, which is higher in the extrinsic form [ 10 , 83 ]. In this sense, some of the twelve studies did not find associations between leptin and IgE in both teenagers and adults [ 68 , 82 ], which suggests that the role of leptin in AD pathogenesis may be due to other inflammatory mechanisms not mediated by IgE, or reported a negative trend in children, thus suggesting that leptin is associated with intrinsic AD [ 81 ]. By contrast, obesity has been positively correlated with high levels of both leptin and IgE, aggravating AD in rats [ 78 ].…”