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It’s Not Just Dry Skin: How Psoriasis Impacts Young Women’s Professional Lives
Meet two women who share the way their skin condition affected their career paths. Plus, tips for juggling a chronic health condition and a busy work schedule.
By Lambeth Hochwald Yagi StudioGetty Images
For Nitika Chopra, 40, psoriasis will always be the thing that impacted her life most. Diagnosed with the chronic skin condition at age 10, Chopra spent many years with about 98 percent of her body covered with scaly red patches.
“When I was looking for jobs psoriasis made it very hard to put myself out there,” says Chopra, who lives in New York City and is a content creator and founder of
Psoriasis is a disease that doesn’t discriminate. It affects people of all ages, genders, religions, socioeconomic status, and yes race. For expert insight on how the condition impacts people from Black, Asian, and Hispanic communities, we turned to three board-certified dermatologists, who helped break down the different ways in which race and psoriasis are interconnected. Here are six of their findings from how common psoriasis is for different ethnicities to the treatment options available for darker skin.
1. It’s not uncommon.
We know that more than eight million Americans have psoriasis, but what do the numbers look like when you break it down by race? And how important is it that we do take race into account in the first place? According to Pooja Sodha, M.D., director of the Center for Laser and Cosmetic Dermatology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., the answer to the latter question is very important.