Skin biopsies are commonly used for the assessment of skin pathology in various skin diseases, including atopic dermatitis (AD). However, because of the invasive nature of skin biopsies, many patients, particularly children, decline participation. This can lead to potential subject sampling bias as data could be skewed toward more severe, older patients who are willing to have biopsies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Expression profiling of skin biopsy specimens has established molecular features of the skin in patients with atopic dermatitis (AD). The invasiveness of biopsies has prevented their use in defining individual-level AD pathobiological mechanisms (endotypes) in large research studies.
Objective: We sought to determine whether minimally invasive skin tape strip transcriptome analysis identifies gene expression dysregulation in AD and molecular disease endotypes.