Your Skin and TNF-Alpha

Generally speaking, it’s the immune system’s job to protect the body against infections, viruses, tumors, and other types of illness. White blood cells called “T-cells” circulate the body regularly, looking for foreign invaders, which are then neutralized as the T-cells find them.

When a patient has psoriasis, however, the immune system misfires, and those T-cells are activated even when there aren’t any foreign invaders to be found. As you might expect, having all those T-cells on alert when there’s nothing to fight results in various problems, including the release of too much of a protein called Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha, or TNF-Alpha. One effect of this extra TNF-Alpha is that the skin becomes red and swollen. But perhaps the bigger problem is that the TNF-Alpha communicates to the skin cells that instead of going through their normal cycle of growth and death over a period of 30 days or so, they should go through the cycle in only three or four days—much faster than their normal rate. In addition, after they’ve died, the skin cells don’t shed as they normally would. Taken together, these factors result in one of the primary external symptoms of psoriasis: red and white scaly patches on the top layer of skin, created by the buildup of dead skin cells, and the swollen, irritated skin underneath. These patches are sometimes referred to as “plaques.”

In fact, plaque psoriasis is by far the most common of the five types of psoriasis (the other four being guttate, inverse, pusutlar, and erythrodermic). About 80% of psoriasis sufferers are diagnosed with plaque psoriasis. Because its cause is rooted in a malfunction of the immune system, psoriasis is not contagious. With the recurring cycle of flare-ups, however, all types of psoriasis can be inconvenient, frustrating, painful, embarrassing, and sometimes even debilitating to live with. All of these factors leave psoriasis sufferers anxious for relief.