Pursuing Pediatric Dermatology: Experiences Treating Epidermolysis Bullosa

During her recent HCPLive interview, medical student Brenda Abreu Molnar, the Society for Pediatric Dermatology’s (SPD) 2022 Medical Student Mentorship Award recipient, described her experiences with the mentorship program and treating epidermolysis bullosa (EB) patients.

Molnar is a Florida International University medical student at the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine in Miami, Florida.

“So, the actual mentorship project that we submitted for the award was to develop a consensus-based document, essentially, for the inpatient management of patients with epidermolysis bullosa,” she explained.

Molnar described a bit about the condition of EB, noting that the severe blistering disorder is characterized by fragile skin that can be prone to significant damage.

“When patients are admitted with EB to the hospital, there are providers who don't necessarily know how to manage the patients,” she said. “And from anywhere, from patient monitoring to getting their blood pressure cuff—because their skin is so fragile—to a full procedure, you know, what does it look like when you're intubating a patient with EB?”

She further described the project she had worked on submitting for the SPD mentorship award.

“There are really no consensus documents in the United States that are uniform and every institution has…an instruction manual that you can hand to nurses or doctors who are working with patients who have EB,” she said. “And so, essentially, my project has been a collaborative effort between Northwestern with Dr. Amy Paller and Columbia University, with Dr. Laura Levin.”

Molnar noted that the EB Clinical Research Consortium, a group of principal investigators from across the world who meet once a month to talk about research projects, support the project.

“And so I've been able to kind of join these meetings and talk about this consensus document and start something that's called a ‘Delphi method,’” she stated. “And that's something I learned this year. So essentially, what that is is that when there is really no randomized control trial, or there's some discrepancy with something, a group of experts comes together, and they vote on what they all recommend.”

To learn more about Molnar’s experiences treating EB and her mentorship project, view the interview segment above.