Time To Read
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OVERVIEW
PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4
PART 5
PART 6
PART 7
Quiz
CHART CLUE
Across a lifetime, Stina collected five “separate” skinThe body’s largest organ, providing protection and regulation. diagnoses — guttate psoriasis, eczema, a sterile “fever rash,” mottled red legs, and slow-healing wounds. Each was treated as a local dermatology problem. Read together, they are one systemic, IL-1β/IL-6-driven autoinflammatory disease wearing the skin as its billboard.
The Story
Stina once asked a dermatologist how she could have both psoriasis and eczema — weren’t they opposites? He said some people are just “sensitive-skinned.” The real answer is more satisfying and more precise, and it lives in the timing of a single conveyor belt. Her plaques and her weeping patches are two different breakdowns of the same assembly line.
Run the belt at normal speed and a keratinocyte takes about 28 days to climb from the basale layer, mature, die into a flat protective scale, and shed. Psoriasis runs the belt at 3–4 days: cellsThe basic structural and functional units of life. arrive unfinished, can’t form a proper barrier, and pile into thick silvery plaques. Eczema keeps roughly normal speed but builds a defective product — the lipid “mortar” and tight junctions are faulty — so the barrier leaks waterThe universal solvent essential for life. out and lets irritants in. Speed problem versus quality problem, both downstream of the same inflammatory signaling. Understanding the belt turns Stina’s “contradiction” into two readings of one dial.
From Stina’s chart: Two skin diagnoses, opposite behaviors: psoriasis (thick, fast, scaly) and eczema (thin, leaky, raw). Same patient, same decade.
Compare Stina’s uninfected appendixA small, finger-like pouch attached to the cecum, thought to play a role in immune function. to an infected appendix.
Activity:
Activity:
A racing or leaking belt is bad enough. But what happens when inflamed skin is actually injured — a cut, a scrape, a biopsy site? Stina’s wounds have a habit of refusing to close.
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Red Feet & Mottled Shins
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Wounds That Won’t Heal
List of terms
- skin
- cells
- water
- appendix