| Summary: | 碩士 === 中山醫學大學 === 醫學研究所 === 90 === Abstract
Cutaneous diseases in adolescents are common in Taiwan and worldwide; however, there is little related data from clinical analysis that has been reported up to now. The purpose of this study was to investigate and to analyze the clinical data of the common cutaneous diseases aimed at the adolescent patients of a dermatologic outpatient department at a medical center in central Taiwan.
A total of 994 adolescent patients with 2,226 total visits, from 11 to 21 years of age, were collected from the Dermatologic Outpatient Department of the Taichung Veteran General Hospital from January to December, 2000.
Results reveal that the most common skin disease in adolescents is acne vulgaris, followed by eczema and infectious skin diseases, in both visit number and in patient number. Stratified by age, the results show that the number of visits for acne vulgaris increased with age, which is related to the hormonal change accompanied with adolescence. The number of visits for atopic dermatitis decreased with age. This showed that this disease is prone to spontaneously decrease as a patient ages. For other disorders, such as seborrheic dermatitis and contact dermatitis, the visit numbers increased with age. This indicates that there is a higher chance to get these diseases in the late stage of adolescence. Among the skin infectious diseases, including viral warts, folliculitis, carbuncle & furuncle, cellulitis and superficial fungal infection and parasite infection, the visit number also increased with age. This finding suggests that due to increased activity and sweating, which favors a microorganism colonization, late-stage adolescents are more prone to get infectious skin diseases.
After analyzing the number of patients in this study and the number of follow-up visits for each type of disease, it can be seen clearly that some skin problems are chronic recurrent diseases, such as acne vulgaris, atopic dermatitis, onychomycosis and psoriasis, and are more difficult to cure. In contrast, infectious skin disease such as bacterial infection can be controlled well.
In conclusion, acne vulgaris, eczema and infectious skin diseases are three major common problems in adolescent at the Dermatologic Outpatient Department. Furthermore this data on frequency distribution at different age and genders provides baseline information on the future works about medical adolescent skin care in Taiwan.
Key words: Cutaneous diseases, adolescence, outpatient department
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