Megan Noe, MD: Diagnosis and Management of Blistering Disorders

In this HCPLive interview, Megan Noe, MD, MPH, MSCE, Associate Professor of Dermatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, described what led up to her conference presentation ‘Diagnosis and Management of Blistering Disorders.’

Noe spoke in the interview segment about her background, before then going into her decision to pursue the topic of blistering disorders in dermatology. Her talk was given at the Society of Dermatology Physician Assistants (SDPA) 2023 Annual Summer Dermatology Conference in Boston.

“I am an assistant professor of dermatology at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where I am the director of the autoimmune bullous disease clinic,” she explained. “So my clinical focus is really on patients with autoimmune blistering diseases. And because of the rarity, we see patients in our clinic from all over the Northeast, and sometimes actually all over the country.”

After this, Noe went into a discussion about what led her to pursue her talk on cutaneous blistering in dermatology patients.

“Like I mentioned, I'm the director of the autoimmune bullous disease clinic at Brigham, so that's something that I focus on,” she said. “And I think that rare diseases like a lot of these autoimmune, blistering diseases are always good for big annual meetings, because it's not something that people see commonly, in general dermatology out in the community. Even at academic medical centers, we don't see it that often. Like I mentioned, we have a big referral basis. So I think it's a good topic for an annual meeting, just as a reminder to everyone about these things that they might not commonly see.”

Noe mentioned that another  important element of what she is trying to convey to her presentation’s audience is that there can be many causes of blisters, and the most common causes of blisters are not autoimmune, bullous diseases.

“So what's so interesting about blisters in dermatology is that the differential diagnosis is very wide,” she said. “So a blister could be caused by something like injury or trauma, which is what the lay community would think of most commonly when we think about friction blisters, think about burns, think about poison ivy, or, like severe allergic contact dermatitis. There are certain infections that can both cause blisters. And then less commonly we think about severe drug reaction, autoimmune diseases and certain genetic disorders.”

Noe explained that in her talk, she covered some of the more common and uncommon reasons for blistering and went in to how to differentiate between the 2 kinds of reasons.

For further information about Noe’s conference presentation, view the HCPLive interview above.

The quotes contained in this article were edited for clarity.