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Dermbits

What are some common triggers for worsening of atopic dermatitis?

Atopic Dermatitis

You. It's amazing. The more patients I meet, the more I realize that there is an entire universe of different things that can cause people to have a flare up, from extreme cold weather to extreme hot weather, to sweating and not washing that off quickly enough to, of course, cats and dogs and other pets, certain fabrics like wool, all of these things. But even things like stress, psychological stress, lack of leap, all of these things can push people towards a flare up. And many of my patients come initially saying, can we try to find the things that are causing a flare up, those triggering events? But after a while, I usually try to sort of allay those concerns, because what we find is there's so many things that could do it. At some point, the only solution would be to be in a bubble or move to the moon, and that's just not going to be something most people can or would want to do, frankly. So what I say is, I turn that around and say there are many, many triggers, and of course, we want to try to find the ones that are easy to find. And we may even do special testing, for example, in the case of somebody that may have either a food exacerbated ad or more commonly, a contact dermatitis, an allergic contact dermatitis that can be triggering their skin as well. We can do specialized testing, but generally speaking, my hope is to get them better, strengthen their skin barrier, and cool the inflammation. If for no other reason than that helps us kind of cut the wheat from the chaff, we can then say, okay, those other things you thought, now you're okay, they're not bothering you, maybe these top two or three things, these still seem to be causing a flare up, and that will really help us know what's going on.