Elderly male patients with hidradenitis suppurativa have more severe disease independent of disease duration

The recent study by van der Weijden et al. proposed defining hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) in the elderly (> 60 years of age) as ‘HS tarda’. We verify and extend the findings by van der Weijden et al. by demonstrating that variation in HS severity is explained to an increasing extent by sex with increasing age, but is independent of overall disease duration, and that HS in the elderly shows significant variation in age of onset and body area involvement. This supports the idea that HS activity varies between different age groups, but the relationship remains more complex than a binary definition.