Professor Luke O'Neill
speaker
1,535 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Professor Luke O'Neill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.
Appearances
We know it's in the skin.
The key feature, as anybody would be familiar with this disease, but now you get red scaly patches on your skin.
And in severe cases, they can cover 80, 90% of your body.
So it's a very serious disease down that end of the spectrum.
What's happening is the cells in your skin are dividing too much.
Now in your skin, you've got things called keratinocytes.
That's the cell type in your skin.
And they're the ones that make the skin actually.
And they turn over.
All cells in our body turn over and they die and are replaced.
In psoriasis, it's very simple.
They're dividing too much and they reckon overall they're dividing about three times the rate in normal skin.
And they pile up and they pile up and they pile up in the skin and they die and then debris is formed and the immune system doesn't like this and it goes in and tries to handle this situation.
And the trouble is that immune reaction then causes all the features of an immune type response.
You get redness, you get itchiness, you get pain, just as if you've scratched yourself, I suppose, in a way.
And in this case, the scratch is being caused by your own cells in your skin dividing too much.
In some ways, we see most autoimmune diseases, they're sometimes called wounds that won't heal properly.
Because you can imagine if you scratch yourself in the skin, it will go red, it will be sore.
The immune system will go in and try to clear sort of any infection that's in the broken skin.
That's what's happening in psoriasis, but there's no infection.
Showing 1281–1300 of 1,535 · page 65 of 77
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