Living with psoriasis can be challenging, with its red, scaly patches affecting both your skin and emotional well-being. But there’s hope – new research is uncovering exciting connections between psoriasis, gut health, and the tiny organisms living on our skin. Let’s break down what we know and how it might help you manage your psoriasis better.
What’s New in Psoriasis Research?
Scientists have just made an exciting discovery about what might cause psoriasis. They found that a hormone called hepcidin, which usually controls iron in our body, could be the trigger for psoriasis. This is big news because it might lead to new treatments that work better than what we have now.
The research revealed that people with psoriasis have too much iron in their skin cells, and their skin makes too much of the hormone hepcidin. When there’s too much hepcidin, skin cells grow too fast and cause inflammation. This discovery opens up new possibilities for treatment, especially for people with severe forms of psoriasis that don’t respond well to current treatments.
Psoriasis & Leaky Gut Connection
Many people don’t realise that psoriasis and gut health are closely connected. When your gut isn’t healthy, it can make your psoriasis worse. Understanding this connection could be key to managing your symptoms better.
Think of your gut like a net that should only let certain things through. When you have “leaky gut,” this net gets holes in it, letting things through that shouldn’t get into your bloodstream. Several factors can damage your gut, including everyday stress, certain medications, inflammatory foods, imbalanced gut bacteria, and environmental toxins. When these factors combine, they can create a perfect storm that triggers psoriasis flare-ups.
How Leaky Gut Makes Psoriasis Worse
The process starts when your gut becomes leaky, allowing food particles that shouldn’t get through your gut wall to enter your bloodstream. Your body sees these particles as invaders and launches an immune response, triggering inflammation throughout your body. This system-wide inflammation can make your psoriasis symptoms significantly worse, creating a cycle that’s hard to break without addressing the underlying gut issues.
The Psoriasis Skin Microbiome Connection
Your skin has a delicate ecosystem of millions of tiny organisms called the skin microbiome. When you have psoriasis, this balance gets disrupted. Research shows that the skin microbiome of people with psoriasis lacks diversity in helpful bacteria and has an overflow of harmful ones. This imbalance can worsen psoriasis symptoms and make them harder to treat.
The connection between psoriasis and overall health becomes clearer when we look at how similar your skin barrier and gut barrier actually are. Both act as crucial protective walls, and when either one fails, it can trigger inflammation throughout your body.
The Skin Barrier: Your Body’s First Defense
Your skin’s protective barrier is like a brick wall. The “bricks” are your skin cells, and the “mortar” is made up of special fats (lipids) that hold everything together. These lipids include ceramides, cholesterol, and fatty acids, which work together to keep moisture in and harmful things out.
Healthy skin depends on good bacteria living on its surface. These helpful bacteria produce an enzyme called lipase that helps create the right mix of lipids for your skin barrier. When your skin’s bacteria are out of balance, you might not have enough of these important lipids, leading to a weakened barrier.
When Barriers Break Down
In psoriasis, we see problems with both barriers. In the gut, the tight junctions between cells become loose, creating the “leaky gut” we talked about earlier. Similarly, in the skin, the lipid barrier becomes damaged, creating what we might call “leaky skin.”
Recent research has found that iron building up in psoriasis plaques might make things worse. The excess iron, controlled by the hepcidin hormone we mentioned earlier, can damage the skin barrier even more and trigger inflammation.
The Immune Connection
When either barrier is compromised, your immune system goes on high alert. In the gut, food proteins leak through and form immune complexes with IgG antibodies. These complexes can then travel through your body and settle in your skin, triggering more inflammation.
The connection is so strong that in clinical practice, we’ve seen remarkable results – about 80% improvement in psoriasis symptoms – when patients identify and avoid their IgG food triggers while working on healing their gut.
Healing the Skin & Gut Barriers
Effective psoriasis treatment needs to address both barriers. For the skin barrier, key ingredients include:
- Urea, which helps maintain skin hydration and supports natural moisturizing factors
- Lipids that match your skin’s natural ones, especially ceramides
- Gentle cleansers that don’t strip away natural oils
- Products that support your skin’s good bacteria (think probiotic and prebiotic skin care)
For the gut barrier, focus on:
- Removing trigger foods identified through IgG testing
- Supporting gut healing with appropriate nutrients
- Building a healthy gut microbiome
- Reducing inflammation through diet and lifestyle changes
How to Help Your Gut and Skin
Healing Leaky Gut to Improve Psoriasis
You can take several steps to heal your gut and potentially improve your psoriasis. Start by identifying your IgG trigger foods – common culprits include gluten, dairy, processed foods, nightshade vegetables, and eggs. Everyone is different, so a simple blood test will help you identify which foods affect your symptoms the most.
The healing process involves more than just avoiding trigger foods. Focus on eating probiotic-rich foods to support healthy gut bacteria, take gut-healing supplements like glutamine when recommended by your healthcare provider, and make stress reduction a priority. Simple changes like eating more whole foods and fewer processed foods can make a significant difference in your gut health and, consequently, your psoriasis symptoms.
Supporting Your Skin Microbiome
Supporting your skin’s healthy bacteria doesn’t require complicated routines. Start with gentle skin products and avoid harsh soaps that can disrupt your skin’s natural balance. Consider trying probiotic skin products, and always keep your skin well-moisturised. These simple steps can help maintain a healthy balance of skin bacteria.
New Treatments on the Horizon
The future of psoriasis treatment looks promising, with several exciting developments in the works. Scientists are developing new treatments that target hepcidin to control iron levels in skin cells, which might help prevent flare-ups. They’re also working on treatments to restore healthy skin bacteria and heal leaky gut.
Perhaps most exciting is the move toward personalised medicine. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, doctors are beginning to create treatment plans based on individual factors like genetic makeup, gut health, and skin microbiome composition.
Looking Forward
While we don’t have a cure for psoriasis yet, understanding these connections between gut health, skin bacteria, and inflammation gives us new ways to treat it. By taking care of both your gut and skin health, you might be able to better manage your psoriasis symptoms.
Remember to work closely with your healthcare provider to find the right combination of treatments for your specific situation. With continued research and new understanding of the connections between gut health, skin microbiome, and psoriasis, more effective treatments are on the horizon.