Clinical psychiatry Self-esteem in vitiligo patients with facial involvement

Objective: There is a strong relationship between dermatologic diseases and psychiatric symptoms. Disease of these two branches of medicine may be present as both causality and co-morbidity. Dermatological diseases accompanying to psychiatric symptoms, especially those with involvement of the face is an unavoidable condition. In this study, analysis of the factors that affect the self-esteem of vitiligo patients with involvement on the face and preliminary data of the study for the purpose of revealing the effect on the severity of the psychiatric symptoms of the disease will be evaluated.

Method: The demographic data forms were filled after an interview with 25 vitiligo patients with facial involvement, who have been followed at a dermatology outpatient clinic. Psychiatric interview was conducted. Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS), Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) and Beck Anxiety Scale (BAS) were applied for psychometric evaluation. The percentage of patients with facial involvement was divided into four groups as 0-25, 25-50, 50-75, 75-100. Disease severities were divided into three groups namely mild, moderate and severe.

Results: LSES-anxiety scores of patients with vitiligo were in a range of 35.6±9.0, LSAS-avoidance scores were 38.4±10.5, BAI scores were 10.7±8.2 and RSES self-esteem subscale scores were 1.08±0.81, respectively. Disease severity of the patients was assessed as mild at 8, moderate at 9 and severe in 8 patients. There was no difference in terms of RSES scores, BAI scores and LSAS scores between the two groups. Factors affecting the RSES scores of the patients were evaluated by linear regression analysis. BAI scores were found to be effective in this regard (p <0.05).

Conclusion: Many studies that have been made previously have revealed decreased self-esteem in patients with vitiligo. In this study, a comparison with the control group could not be made because of using the preliminary data. In previous studies, self-esteem was found to decrease as the prevalence of lesions was increasing in patients with vitiligo. However, such a result could not be obtained in our study. Moreover, the level of self-esteem was found to be more relevant with the severity of lesions than anxiety.