Combination Therapy for Vitiligo Treatment

Dr. Natasha Mesinkovska:
Hi, my name is Natasha Mesinkovska and I am Vice Chair for Clinical Research at University of California, Irvine. I'm very excited about vitiligo because ever since we had the first topical approved in 2022, it's a JAK inhibitor, it has really changed the way we can approach this condition. However, there are a couple of tips I think we all still have to understand a little bit better. What happens when, for example, there's too much body area for the cream to cover or when the treatment is not working out? Combination, combination, combination. With what? With phototherapy. Narrowband UVB, it's still the standard of something I add to the topical treatments when patient needs it or is just not getting that right response. So whether it's two or three times a week, that's definitely what I try, on average for 16 weeks. Okay, so that's my first tip for the combination.

The second thing, a recent study actually showed that one of my favorite light devices, excimer, which we use usually for more smaller area for segmental disease, can actually be comparable to a home device at the same wavelength, the 308 nanometers. So studies comparing the in-office excimer and the home device show that they have comparable efficacy. And that is something that maybe patients who have busy lives, students who can't come to the office as much as we want them to, can actually consider. And the third thing that I always try to tell everybody for the past year is a big study from Korea actually showed that patients with vitiligo have lower mortality rates. So that's great. All-cause mortality. And it was a very big population based study. So good tips for all of our patients to reassure them as to what this condition means to them while we're trying to tackle and improve their quality of life.