Effects of psychosocial interventions on patient-reported outcomes in patients with psoriasis: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Psychosocial interventions offer an effective means to improve quality of life and anxiety in patients with psoriasis. Although the importance of such psychosocial aspects for psoriasis is unquestioned, there is a lack of high-quality evaluation studies. Nontransparent reporting of risk of bias, low power and a lack of replication studies make it difficult to reach confident conclusions from the evidence. What's already known about this topic? Psoriasis symptoms and psychosocial burden reinforce one another. Different psychosocial interventions for patients with psoriasis exist to address this problem. Most studies report positive effects on psoriasis severity, and some also on certain patient-reported outcomes such as quality of life. Only a very few interventions have been subject to rigorous testing. Further research is needed on the evaluation of the effects and the methodological quality of these interventions. What does this study add? This review provides a comprehensive overview of psychosocial interventions for patients with psoriasis. It evaluates the effects of the interventions on patient-reported outcomes and rates the methodological quality of their evaluation studies. It underlines the importance and effectiveness of addressing psychosocial burden in patients with psoriasis by identifying adequate interventions. The results of this study show that further research, especially with adequately tested interventions, is strongly needed.