Analyses of skin surface lipid in patients with microbially associated skin disease.

The composition of the total skin surface lipid, free fatty acids and fatty acid of triglyceride was used in discriminant analyses to classify patients with severe acne vulgaris (AV), pityriasis versicolor (PV), seborrhoeic dermatitis (SD) and atopic dermatitis (AD). It was not possible to discriminate between the PV and SD patients but all the lipid groups gave a satisfactory separation between AV, PV + SD and AD patients. A similar separation was obtained when the sex of the patient was studied but not when both sex and disease were taken into account. The results suggest that there are fundamental differences in the composition of skin lipid between patients with microbially associated diseases, but the precise role of the organisms has not been ascertained.