Amy Paller, MD: What Treatments Can Be Used in Pediatric Patients with Eczema?

In an interview held at the Revolutionizing Atopic Dermatitis (RAD) 2024 Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois, the HCPLive editorial team spoke with Amy Paller, MD, MS, professor and chair of the department of dermatology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

During the interview, Paller spoke with HCPLive about the major takeaways from her RAD 2024 talk titled ‘What can we use in our pediatric patients?’ The discussion covered a variety of treatment data for atopic dermatitis as well as tips on JAK inhibitor use and administration of biologics.

“In the pediatric population, atopic dermatitis is one of the most common problems that we see in our clinics,” Paller said. “It affects 10 to 20% of children, and unfortunately, especially as children get older and continue to have the disease, many of them have moderate to severe disease. They'll often come to us because they're not responding to low-strength steroids or whatever other physicians are comfortable with prescribing.”

Paller discussed tips for clinicians, noting that topical corticosteroids and topical calcineurin inhibitors remain the mainstay of eczema treatment.

“I'll get into a little bit about some of the newer topicals that have come out just over the last few years, and 2 emerging ones that I suspect will be available within the next year,” Paller explained. “That's roflumilast and also tapinarof. We'll get into, then, the systemic ways to treat and why one might need to switch a child from just topicals to the combination of topicals and a systemic agent.”

Paller was asked specifically about her presentation’s points about JAK inhibitor use among children.

“We continue to have more data coming out on adolescents who have atopic dermatitis and are taking the JAK inhibitors, and they look very promising so far,” Paller said. “I remind that the box warning was based on a population that used tofacitinib…This was a population of 50 years and older with at least 1 cardiovascular risk factor. They all had rheumatoid arthritis and were not well individuals. They had, in many cases, a long history of a chronic disease that's very different from atopic dermatitis and our healthier populations, including the population of young people with atopic dermatitis.”

For additional information, view the full interview with Paller from RAD 2024 posted above.

The quotes contained here were edited for the purposes of clarity.