¹Department of Dermatology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Correspondence: Dr Robert S Stern, Department of Dermatology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, 330 Brookline Avenue, GZ522, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA. E-mail: rstern@bidmc.harvard.edu

Abstract

The potential of newly introduced medications to cause acute inflammatory skin diseases has long been recognized. Less well accepted and not often systematically studied is the role of long-term drug use in inflammatory skin diseases such as eczema. Hypothesis-driven case–control studies provide what is probably the most efficient but far from easy method to evaluate and quantify observations from case reports and case series that suggest a drug etiology for chronic skin diseases.