Association of Plasma Zinc Status with Severity of Lesions in Patients with Acne Vulgaris: A Cross-Sectional Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Zinc (Zn) is an essential trace mineral that plays a critical role in maintaining overall skin health and functionality. Zn deficiency has been linked to various dermatological conditions, including acne, eczema, and delayed wound healing, highlighting the mineral’s indispensable role in promoting skin resilience and health. Some investigators have refuted these findings. Objective: was to determine plasma Zn level and Zn status in patients with Acne vulgaris (AV) belonging to Nowshera, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) and to find any possible relationship between Zn status & severity of the acne lesions. Methods: Hundred patients of either sex with untreated AV were randomly selected in a cross-sectional study. Based on the Global Acne Grading System (GAGS) the acne lesions were categorized as mild, moderate & severe. Blood samples were taken for determination of serum Zn. The relationship of Zn status with severity of lesions was determined with Pearson Correlations coefficient (r). Results: The study included 42 males and 58 females with male to female ratio of 1:1.4. Mean age was 21.8 years. The average plasma zinc level across the cohort was 67.4 ± 12.6 µg/dL, with males showing slightly higher zinc levels (69.1 ± 11.8 µg/dL) than females (65.8 ± 13.2 µg/dL), though this difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.092). 22% had mild acne, 46% moderate acne and 32% had severe acne. Patients with severe acne had significantly lower plasma zinc levels (60.2 ± 10.4 µg/dL) compared to those with mild acne (73.1 ± 13.1 µg/dL) (p < 0.01). Pearson’s correlation analysis revealed a significant inverse relationship between plasma zinc status and acne severity (r = -0.43, p < 0.001), indicating that lower zinc levels were associated with more severe acne. No significant gender differences were observed in the relationship between zinc levels and acne severity. Conclusion: Pasma Zn concentration is markedly decreased in patients with AV and the more severe is the lesion, the more Hypozincemia. Hence, Plasma Zn status is associated negatively with severity of AV lesions in the studied population.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".