Can Psoriasis Cause a Heart Attack?

Psoriasis seems to raise one's risk for a heart attack, a new study suggests. And this link may be strongest in young patients with severe psoriasis.

Psoriasis is a chronic disease caused when the immune system attacks the body's own cells. This causes large, itchy patches of thick, scaly skin to form on the surface of the skin. But the affects of psoriasis seems to go beyond skin deep, causing inflammation throughout the body.

"We think that some of the immune system abnormalities that cause psoriasis also cause the things that influence heart disease," said Dr. Joel M. Gelfand, lead study author and assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Inflammation is a natural response that the body produces whenever the immune system is at work fighting an infection. But, since psoriasis causes chronic inflammation, it may adversely affect the heart and blood vessels, said Gelfand.

Previous studies have made a connection between psoriasis and heart disease, but many psoriasis sufferers smoke, have diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, all risk factors for heart disease. As a result, a direct link between the two conditions was never clear.

"Several studies have indicated that psoriasis is associated with a higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease, including [heart attack]," said Gelfand. "However, these studies did not control for any associated risk factors for heart attack [such as diabetes and smoking]."

For the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Society, Gelfand and colleagues looked at the medical records of over 130,000 patients with mild to severe psoriasis and a healthy control group. The team also took into account age, gender, smoking history, weight and medical history..

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Almost 3 percent of the patients with severe psoriasis had a heart attack, compared to 2 percent in the healthy population. Additionally, the younger a patient with severe psoriasis was, the greater the risk of eventually having a heart attack seemed to be.