TUESDAY, Jan. 20 (HealthDay News) -- Virtual communities of psoriasis patients allow users to benefit from educational resources as well as psychological and social support systems, researchers report in the January issue of the Archives of Dermatology.

Shereene Z. Idriss, of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and colleagues conducted an online survey to evaluate patient usage of online psoriasis-specific support sites. The surveys were designed to collect information regarding patient demographics and attitudes, patterns of support site usage, perceived benefits and patient experiences. A total of 260 adult respondents were recruited from five online psoriasis support groups.

The average age of the survey respondents was 40.1 years, and the majority of participants were white females with college education. Patients reported several factors associated with their use of these online sites including resource availability (95.3 percent), convenience (94 percent), access to good advice (91 percent) and lack of embarrassment (90.8 percent), the investigators found. The online activities most frequently reported were message posting (65 percent) and research (63.1 percent). Importantly, approximately half of the participants felt they had quality-of-life improvements (49.5 percent) and symptom improvement (41 percent) since joining the support site.

The authors assert that "the dermatology community should consider leveraging the infrastructure of online support groups to build on delivering personalized and integrated medical care to individuals affected by psoriasis."

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