The Psychological Condition of Vitiligo Patients Should not be Ignored.

Psychological factors play a vital role in a person's health, they generally refer to external stimuli that can cause negative emotions such as depression and anxiety. In clinical practice, we also often find that some vitiligo patients have lesions that occur after mental stress and negative life events. There is a Chinese fable story that the allusion to the snake in the wine, although is actually the shadow of a bow, could cause health issues for the person who drinks that wine. This allusion is a good example of the influence of psycho factors on a person's mood and health. Human emotions are diverse and Chinese medicine classifies them into seven categories: happiness, anger, worry, thought, grief, fear, and surprises, called seven emotions in short. These are important factors for the treatment of disease, Traditional Chinses Medicine believes happiness hurts the heart, anger hurts the liver, thought hurts the spleen, worry hurts the lungs and fear hurts the kidneys.

Some scholars have conducted clinical statistics on the causes of vitiligo and found that cases induced by psychological factors accounted for about 35%, some are mental stimulation, some are mental overstress, some are excessive tension in the mind, excessive psychological pressure, depressed mood, and other factors.

So why could psychological factors induce vitiligo?

1. Sublimation metabolic pathway of tyrosinase. Histogenetically, melanocytes and neuronal cells are both derivatives of ectoderm, melanocytes synthesize melanin in the presence of tyrosine and neuronal cells synthesize catecholamines in the presence of tyrosine. Catechol is structurally similar to dopa. When people are mentally stressed, sympathetic excitation and increased synthesis of catecholamines constitute a competitive inhibition of melanin synthesis.

2. Neural, endocrine, and immune pathways. Recent studies have demonstrated that psychological stress can influence the interaction between the central nervous system and the immune system, which is partly through hormones and neuropeptides. Many clinical cases show that vitiligo patients are often accompanied by different endocrine disorders and immune dysfunctions, therefore, it is speculated that psychological factors inducing vitiligo are most likely to be caused by disorders of the immune system through the neuro-endocrine system. For example, some scholars reported that vitiligo complicated with baldness is four times of vitiligo patients alone. These all support that psychological factors are one of the important reasons for inducing and aggravating vitiligo.