Clinical Study of PET/CT and Association With Metabolic Syndrome/Depressive Symptoms in Psoriasis

Psoriasis is associated with increases in markers of inflammation in the skin and blood and increasingly is thought to be a systemic inflammatory disease and risk factor for incident diabetes mellitus, myocardial infarction, stroke, and premature cardiovascular death. Furthermore, it is important for clinicians to be aware that psoriasis can have a substantial emotional impact on an individual, which is not necessarily related to the extent of skin disease. FDG-PET/CT represents an innovative approach to studying systemic inflammation in a manner that is sensitive, quantifiable, and anatomically localizable. Also, recent study show that chronic disease such as end stage renal disease with depressive symptoms have decreased cerebral glucose metabolism in several brain areas in F-18-FDG PET/CT. So this protocol was designed to evaluate usefulness of PET/CT to detect systemic inflammation and abnormality of cerebral glucose metabolism and association with metabolic syndrome/major depressive symptoms in patients with psoriasis.