Depression and anxiety among psoriasis patients

Introduction:
Psoriasis is a chronic and non-contagious skin disease. Patients with psoriasis might experience many mental disorders that affect all aspects of the patient's life.

Objective:
To investigate the prevalence of depression and anxiety among patients with psoriasis.

Material and methods:
This was a cross-sectional descriptive study on 149 psoriasis patients who were referred to the dermatology clinic in 2021. Questionnaires, including demographics, Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), and Psoriasis Area Severity Index (PASI), were used. The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 28. The level of significance was set at 0.05.

Results:
In this study the mean age was 40.30 ±10.38 years. The female population was 59.7%. It was observed that 25.5%, 47%, and 27.5% of participants had mild, moderate, and severe psoriasis, respectively. Furthermore, 23.5% of the participants reported some degree of depression, and 36% had some degree of anxiety. The frequency of depression was significantly higher in people with comorbidities (p = 0.001). The severity of depression and anxiety had a significant relationship with each other (r = 0.3, p < 0.001).

Conclusions:
There was no link between depression and anxiety with psoriasis in our study. We suggest more studies should be done with a larger sample size.