Pemphigus: New approaches to diagnosis and disease severity assessment

Abstract

Pemphigus represents a group of severe and potentially fatal autoimmune bullous diseases. Pemphigus clinical findings represents skin and/or mucous membranes keratinocytes acantholysis with intraepithelial blisters and erosions formation which is life-threatening and, if relapsed, significantly reduce the patients quality of life. The on-time disease diagnosis is a key to successful pemphigus management and timely treatment onset allowing intensive disease progression avoidance. The article reviews up-to-date diagnosing methods and assessment measure for monitoring pemphigus severity. In addition to standard diagnosis methods, such as clinical findings, histological examination, direct and indirect immunofluorescence, and enzyme immunoassay (ELISA), the article focuses on revieing new diagnostic and disease severity prediction approaches, such as microRNAs expression and skin and mucous membranes microbiome analysis since false positive and false negative results in histological and immunohistochemical analysis as well as the laboratories insufficient equipment makes finding pemphigus new diagnostic and prognostic methods a relevant challenge.