Obesity and Smoking contribute to severity of chronic hand eczema

Smoking and obesity were linked to chronic hand eczema (CHE) and hand eczema severity (HE) says an article published in Contact Dermatitis. With a growing emphasis in medicine on preventative and tailored treatment programmes, lifestyle behavior is becoming an important study issue in skin disorders. The relationship between lifestyle factors and HE was recently explored in a large cohort of the Dutch general population.

This study was conducted by L. Loman and team with an objective to investigate the relationship between lifestyle variables and HE in the same large cohort of the Dutch general population, but with a focus on the prevalence of CHE and severity of HE.

In this cross-sectional questionnaire study, the data from the Lifelines Cohort Study, a multi-disciplinary prospective population-based cohort study investigating the health and health-related behaviors of 169 729 people living in the north of the Netherlands.5 From 2006 to 2013, information on lifestyle factors was collected, and an additional questionnaire with questions about HE was sent out to all adults in 2020. In all, 58 198 individuals (42.8 percent) replied, with 57 046 of them being 18 years or older at the time of the survey and so included in the current study. The University Medical Center Groningen acquired institutional review board permission, and all individuals provided informed consent. Age, gender, atopic dermatitis (AD), and wet activities were all controlled for in the multivariate analysis. Statistical significance was defined as p-values less than 0.05.