Skin Picking Disorder: A Canadian Retrospective Study of 83 Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Skin picking disorder (SPD) is classified as a primary psychodermatologic disorder, in which lesions are self-induced. It is frequently encountered by dermatologists, but the management is still a source of discomfort for the majority. OBJECTIVES: The first objective is to determine the characteristics of the SPD patients in our centre: the demographics, the psychiatric comorbidities, clinical and histopathological characteristics of SPD patients, treatments and follow-up. The second objective is to demonstrate the need for education in the dermatologic community. METHODS: Qualitative and quantitative data on SPD were collected. RESULTS: The sample comprised 83 patients, with a mean age of 62 years, and a bimodal distribution. 63.8% were female and lesions were most frequently described as excoriations (27%). Physicians observed picking from multiple body sites, the most common being upper extremities. Only 11% of patients were biopsied. Psychiatric comorbidities were frequent, especially personality traits and disorders (19.2%), and substance-related and addictive disorders (16.8%). Wide variety of treatments were prescribed, including local and supportive care. Only 41% of the sample had medical follow-ups. CONCLUSIONS: This large-scale retrospective assessment of patients diagnosed with SPD broadens the scope of a frequent disorder in dermatology, showing older age patients, unexpected psychiatric comorbidities and inadequate continuity of care. Results highlight the need for a collaborative approach and for frequent reassessments of these patients.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".