What Other Health Conditions Often Occur With HS?

Christopher Sayed, M.D., associate professor of dermatology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains potential hidradenitis supprativa (HS) comorbidities and the conditions you might want to get screened for.

There are a number of other conditions that overlap with HS and figuring out when to screen for those things is often a challenge. Some of the things that we see most often along with HS are things like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which often also happen in young female patients, who often have trouble with being overweight. Asking patients if they have regular menstrual cycles is a pretty simple screen for something like that.

We know that patients with HS are also more likely to have other chronic inflammatory conditions like Crohn's disease. Asking about bowel symptoms or if patients are presenting with bowel symptoms, that could be another thing to ask more about and potentially do more screening for. Often things like depression and anxiety complicate HS as well, so that's another good question to ask patients about and make sure you're supporting them in that way, if you can.

Probably one of the things that's most prevalent amongst the HS population is diabetes. If we look at large population studies, probably somewhere between at least 20 to 30 percent of patients with HS also have diabetes. We did a study in our clinic where everybody who walked in the door, we screened for diabetes, knowing that probably we were going to discover at least some people. We found that about 20 percent of patients already had known diabetes and another 20 percent were sort of in a pre-diabetic range. There are a large number of patients out there that probably have no idea that they may be at risk, where screening would be useful. I think that's something we're probably that will be more commonly done in the future, too.