Researchers have found that human papillomavirus infection is more likely to be found in those with hidradenitis suppurativa (HS), an inflammatory skin disease. Although the cause of HS is still unknown, researchers think that some chronic inflammatory skin diseases might be related to infections. A new study was recently published in the Journal of American Academy of Dermatology conducted by Gau and colleagues.The study aimed to establish whether patients who are HPV-infected have a higher risk of developing HS. In employing the retrospective cohort comparison, researchers compared patients who had been diagnosed with the HPV infection to a control group that did not have the infection. This study controlled age, sex, race, BMI, and other lifestyle factors as confounders.This analysis originated from the TriNetX research network with 582,007 HPV-infected patients and a similar number of matched controls. To balance the groups by demographics, health characteristics, and lifestyle variables, this study used propensity score matching between the groups of patients with HPV and those in the control group. To find out how likely patients are to develop HS after the diagnosis of HPV, hazard ratios (HR) accompanied by their 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to confirm the robustness of findings across different subgroups of patients.The patients who were diagnosed with HPV had a higher risk of having HS than those without the same diagnoses; the hazard ratio was 1.356 (95% CI: 1.290–1.427). This results in the risk of HS to be increased by 35.6% in patients infected with HPV.The increased risk was consistent across the different categories of demographics and clinical characteristics, suggesting a potentially wide applicability of HPV as a risk factor for HS. Age, sex and BMI did not importantly modify the increased risk.With both the HPV and control cohorts totaling 582,007 patients, this is one of the largest ever studies in terms of cohort size to examine the role of HPV in inflammatory skin conditions and, thus, validates its relevance and generalizability.From this study, it was concluded that there was an elevated risk for developing HS associated with the HPV infection. This adds to the evidence of a possible connection between viral infection and inflammatory skin diseases. Such findings point to the fact that further investigations of the role of infections in HS could lead to better understanding and management of this challenging condition.Reference:Gau, S.-Y., Lo, S.-W., Hsu, C., Chen, S.-J., Zuberbier, T., & Chang, H.-C. (2024). Human papillomavirus infection is associated with increased risk of new-onset hidradenitis suppurativa: a population-based cohort study. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaad.2024.10.055