Skin findings seen with myositis autoantibodies and treatment of skin in dermatomyositis

Dr. Victoria Werth

About Dr. Victoria Werth

Dr. Victoria Werth is a Professor of Dermatology and Medicine, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Chief of Dermatology, Philadelphia VAMC. She is an internist and dermatologist with a practice devoted to autoimmune skin diseases. She has guided development and validation of disease severity tools currently being used in lupus, dermatomyositis, and autoimmune blistering disease studies. She is leading a multicenter collaborative, web-based database to collect prospective information on patients with skin and systemic manifestations of lupus erythematosus. This is the first systematic epidemiologic study of cutaneous lupus erythematosus in the United States. At the University of Pennsylvania alone, the first prospective evaluations of cutaneous lupus erythematosus in order to assess disease severity, quality of life, and response to treatment, as well as complete validation studies of the CLASI, a disease severity tool for cutaneous lupus, have been collected from information on over 350 patients. Dr. Werth is a member of the Medical & Scientific Committee of the Lupus Foundation of America, Associate Editor for the Lupus Science & Medicine journal, and her research has been funded by the Alliance for Lupus Research, Lupus Foundation of America, Lupus Research Institute, The Myositis Association, NIH, and the VA.

Dr. Werth received her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, completed her postgraduate residency at Northwestern Medical Center in internal medicine and in dermatology at the New York University Medical Center, and has authored over 200 papers.