Therapy of psoriasis: comparison of photochemotherapy and several variants of phototherapy

Four treatments involving light were compared in two series of patients with severe psoriasis. The first series consisted of ten patients, who were treated by the method of paired comparisons. The treatments given were: (1) exposure to fluorescent sunlamps (B); (2) the same, supplemented by fluorescent UV-A lamps (A + B); (3) the same as (2) with the addition of the radiation from germicidal lamps (A + B + C); (4) photochemotherapy with oral 8-MOP followed by UV-A (PUVA); (5) one of the fields served as control, receiving no light at all. The second series consisted of thirty patients. They were treated either with PUVA or with a placebo capsule followed by A + B (pUVAB). The phototherapies examined differed from many previous attempts in that the increments in dose were made sufficiently large to overcome the increasing tolerance of the skin to light during the treatment. It is concluded (a) that phototherapy, if conducted in this way, is as effective as PUVA, and (b) that the effectiveness achieved with the phototherapies examined is due to the light from the fluorescent sunlamps (B).