SDPA Literature Review Session Shares Clinical Pearls

What are some of the most important dermatological studies published this year, and what impact (in any) should the studies and their results have on every day clinical practice?

Cynthia Griffith, MPAS, PA-C, and Elenitsa Sebat, MS, PA-C, will share the answers to those questions and more in their upcoming session at the 2024 Society for Dermatology Physician Assistants Annual Summer Dermatology Conference in San Diego, California.1 First, Griffith, who is a physician assistant at UT Southwestern Medical Center amd editor in chief of the Journal of Dermatology for Physician Assistants, and Elenitsa Sebat, MS, PA-C, who is assistant clinical professor at UC Davis, discussed some of the issues and what to expect in an exclusive interview with Dermatology Times.

“We're super excited to be here in sunny San Diego to present this literature review,” Griffith told Dermatology Times. “To do this, we looked at the top journals for the past year, and we really focused on practical information for our providers so that we could get the most bang for our buck. As we look back on the major advances in dermatology in the last year.”

“As we were going through the literature, there were a couple of things that were really important to us,” Sebat said. “We wanted to pick high impact journals, so journals that have a reputation for studies that are more rigorous. We also really try to find prospective as well as meta analyses, because those you're able to control and have larger numbers. However, we did find some wonderful observational studies and of course, we'll talk about the limitations of those, but all of them should be clinically applicable for your day to day practice.”

“The first article that we highlight in our talk is an article about the loosening of restrictions around PA scope of practice in the United States,” Griffith explained. “They [the researchers] looked at malpractice claims in the United States over the past year as paid by the malpractice payment when we had these malpractice claims. And it was really interesting that they found that as we had sort of a loosening of restrictions around PAs’ scope of practice, for instance, a decoupling of licenses and a removal of scope. As far as the number of miles of practice you might be from a supervising physician, they found, actually, a decrease in malpractice incidents for physicians and no impact on malpractice for PAs. A lot of these scope of practice changes happened as a result of COVID, and as a result of in rural areas and increase in access to care for patients. So I think that it's comforting to us all to know that as that was happening, there was no increase in incidence of these malpractice payments.”

“We also are going to present updated guidelines on atopic dermatitis, which has been published this year, which was an update since 2014,” Sebat noted.

“When we have almost a decade that we went without [an update],” Griffith added.
“And we have so many advances that have happened in the past decade. There were topical guidelines, as well as recommendations for systemic therapy that was published in the JAAD.”

“And we' re going to cover topics like nutraceuticals for acne, what do we know about that? Isotretinoin and suicidality, or risk of attempted suicide,” Sebat told Dermatology Times. “So stay tuned. We've got some really great articles to present!”

Reference

Griffith C, Sebat E. Literature Update: What You Need to Know. Presented at the 2024 SDPA Annual Summer Dermatology Conference. June 5 – 9, 2026. San Diego, California.