From basic research to biological treatments: psoriasis publications over the past 15 years.

In the past few decades, great progress has been made in psoriasis research, culminating with the development of new, biological treatments. We designed this study to test the hypothesis that there is a linear increase in psoriasis publications over time. We evaluated all PubMed articles from 1 January 1993 to 31 December 2007. We categorized the search into basic science, traditional therapy and new biological treatments. We used regression analysis to determine the effect of year of publication upon number of publications of each type. There was a significant quadratic increase in the number of all types of psoriasis publications, with basic science-related publications being greatest, followed by relevant clinical publications. We conclude that better understanding of psoriasis immunopathology has led to a significant yearly increase in clinical studies, contributing approximately 60% of studies in the entire field of dermatology reports.