Exactly what causes psoriasis is still not fully understood but it continues to be intensively researched. There are several factors which seem to influence it which will be covered here, together with some of the things that have been mistakenly supposed to be the causes of psoriasis or connected with it in some way. It is by gathering more and more information about the nature of the condition that we are most likely to come to explain what causes psoriasis and perhaps from there discover the best psoriasis treatment to cure or to prevent it.
Psoriasis Causes – Is It Inherited?
It is well known that psoriasis tends to run in families. If one of your parents has the problem, you will have a one in four or five chance of developing it (much greater than the average likelihood). If both parents suffer from psoriasis the risk will increase to one in two. If one of a pair of twins gets it the other twin is particularly likely to get it as well. With identical twins there is a 70 per cent chance that, if one has psoriasis, the other one will too.
The fact that psoriasis can often not show itself until late in life does not rule out the possibility that it is an inherited condition. Many disorders that are inherited lie dormant for a number of years before showing themselves.
Other features of what causes psoriasis, however, are not so easy to fit into the ordinary rules of heredity. To start with it is odd that, although in 90 per cent of cases where identical twins have the disease both of them will have it, there are still some cases where one twin develops it and the other does not. As both have identical genes it is hard to explain why, if psoriasis is an inherited condition, they should not always both follow exactly the same pattern.
What Causes Psoriasis
Another puzzle is the way that, in about a third of all cases, the causes of psoriasis can occur out of the blue and afflict someone who has no family history of the disease at all. One theory is that this is due to what is called a new mutation. This means either that the genes that have been inherited only produce psoriasis under certain circumstances, or that there has been a freak alteration in the genes of one particular person. But there is no real evidence to support this idea in connection with what causes psoriasis.
There are also oddities about the way in which psoriasis seems to be handed down from parent to child. It does not follow the same pattern as for many other traits we inherit such as eye color. It seems to be more akin to the way we inherit general features such as height and intelligence, which result from a combination of several genetic factors in each parent.
What Causes Psoriasis – Is It Inherited?
Studies of the what causes psoriasis and how it is inherited have been extensively researched, especially along the lines of investigating one particular factor in the disease known as HLA groupings. From this type of research it has emerged that there are two ‘types’ of ordinary plaque-type psoriasis: one which tends to develop in young adults, and another that starts in the fifties or sixties. At the moment, while it is clear that the causes of psoriasis are greater in some families than in others, we still do not fully understand whether or how it is directly inherited.
What Causes Psoriasis – A Disorder Or Disease
Causes of Psoriasis
Two other possible explanations of the slightly unusual factors of what causes psoriasis occurs within families are worth mentioning. The first is that psoriasis might not be one disorder but a collection of similar diseases, each of which has its own different pattern of inheritance. There is some evidence that this applies to nappy psoriasis and pustular psoriasis on the palms and soles. As pointed out above, there certainly seem to be two sorts of plaque-type psoriasis. If so, this would explain many of the current mysteries about why psoriasis seems to have some of the typical characteristics of an inherited disease but not others.
The second suggestion for what causes psoriasis is that it might be some kind of viral infection. This would increase the risk of members of the same family getting it as they might transfer it to each other. This is not, of course, the same as inheriting the disease, and is a separate question which we shall look at in a future article.
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