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Lakshi Aldredge, MSN, ANP-BC, DCNP, of VA Portland Health Care System in Oregon, hypothesizes how the management of atopic dermatitis and our understanding of the condition will change over time.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

If I had a crystal ball and looked at 2024, what we're also going to understand are the comorbidities associated with atopic dermatitis. We have a lot of data and literature about comorbidities in psoriasis, which we originally thought was only a skin condition. I think our understanding of eczema and its potential comorbidities is going to expand. I think that we're also going to have a lot of differences, hopefully, in the way we treat patients with some of the existing and newer treatments as far as the frequency of use. My hope is that we'll have an effective treatment that's maybe used once or twice, or even three or four times, a year only, but can help control flares very effectively. So a decrease in the frequency of use, so that we have lovely long-term remission with very infrequent use. I hope that will also be an important factor.

I also hope that we'll have some affordability of these treatment options for communities of need, and for those folks who perhaps have ethnic, cultural, or other considerations, with our understanding of what works better for those different skin types. We could do a test potentially that shows which treatments or cytokines would be more effectively targeted in certain individuals. So instead of having them go through multiple treatment therapies, we can identify and say, this is the treatment hopefully that's going to be giving you the best control -- so less variance in disease and more focused therapy.

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