Eight weeks of newborn emollient was linked to half the eczema at age five

The edition in brief

Five-year blinded follow-up of the single-centre STOP-AD trial found that high-risk term infants given twice-daily whole-body emollient for the first eight weeks of life had a lower point prevalence of atopic dermatitis at age five (12.3% vs 24.0%; RR 0.52, 95% CI 0.26–1.02), and milder disease when it occurred. Only 177 children were assessed, and the multiple-imputation estimate crossed no effect, so the result is encouraging but uncertain, and larger emollient trials have been mixed. A retrospective Chinese multicentre study built a six-item score predicting a high pre-treatment interferon-γ release assay response in psoriasis patients starting biologics; positivity ranged from about 3% in low-risk to 14–33% in high-risk groups, and the score's accuracy fell in an external cohort. In high-burden settings, including India, that background rate argues for keeping TB screening before IL-17 and IL-23 inhibitors rather than following low-burden exemptions. The phase 2 AMETHYST study found litifilimab, an anti-BDCA2 antibody, gave more clear or almost-clear cutaneous lupus erythema at week 16 than placebo (14.7% vs 2.9%), with CLASI-70 at week 24 of 21.7% versus 5.8%; it is not approved. The pearl is the fingertip unit.