Letter regarding “Histopathology of Psoriasis Treated With Zinc Pyrithione”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To the Editor: Dr. Aliaga raises two important questions that may prove impossible to answer. Various authorities believe they have found evidence of steroids in some product samples, but the manufacturer asserts that the absence of clobetasol propionate can be shown using special analytic techniques. Zinc pyrithione compounds currently manufactured as Skin Cap imitators in the United States do not seem to be as potent as the original, even when formulated with clobetasol, so any study should properly compare the original, a copy with clobetasol, and a copy without clobetasol. Castelijns et al. (1), studying clobetasol alone, noted no significant apoptotic cells during a two week trial, which suggests that increased apoptosis is not a prominent mechanism of plaque resolution by corticosteroid application, which does not exclude its having a therapeutic role if this product did indeed contain corticosteroids. Despite the uncertainty of the active ingredient in Skin Cap, we believe this study nonetheless has elicited some significant observations, which will be investigated in greater depth in the future. No other studies have apparently addressed this issue, and clearly more study is needed. Regrettably, the manufacturer has so far, to our knowledge, not stepped forward to assist in developing the science behind the sometimes spectacular clinical effects of this compound. Our review may be both the first and last to deal with this specific compound. We hope others will look further into the role of apoptosis in inducing psoriatic plaque resolution by this and other therapeutic modalities. Caroline G. Rowlands, M.B.B.S., F.R.C.P.C. F. William Danby, M.D., F.R.C.P.C
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".