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Revista Portuguesa de Estomatologia,
Medicina Dentária e Cirurgia Maxilofacial

rev port estomatol med dent cir maxilofac. 2021;62(1):29-34

Original Research

Lichen planus and its therapeutic management:
a retrospective study

a,b
b,c
a,
Mariana Rodrigues Rebelo *, Cristina Palmela Pereira , Rui Sousa Santos ,
d
Luís Soares-de-Almeida , Paulo Filipe d
a Faculdade de Medicina Dentária, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.
b Centro de Estatística e Aplicações, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon Portugal.
c Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão do Instituto Politécnico de Leiria, Leiria, Portugal.
d Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Objectives: To study the epidemiological distribution of the disease lichen planus and its
Received 28 August 2020 therapeutic management.
Accepted 20 February 2021 Methods: A total of 174 patients with a lichen planus diagnosis between 2008 and 2017 at a
Available online xx March 2021 Portuguese public hospital were included in this retrospective study. The following data were
collected from clinical records: gender, age, topographic distribution of lesions, prescribed
Keywords: therapy (active substance, route, and scheme of administration), mean duration of illness,
®
®
Corticosteroids and episodes of cure and relapse. Statistical analysis was performed using IBM SPSS
Dermatology Statistics software, version 25.
Epidemiology Results: In this population, lichen planus affected both genders with the same probability
Lichen planus (p=0.820), and was more prevalent in the 4th-5th decades of age. The lesions appeared in
Therapeutics the skin (75.9% of the patients), mucous membranes (5.2%), or both (19.0%). The most pre-
scribed drugs were corticosteroids, followed by antihistamines and immunosuppressants.
Topical corticosteroids were the most common ones, namely clobetasol propionate (37.4%).
Within the systemic corticosteroids, prednisolone was the most prescribed drug (12.3%). The
average duration of lesions and symptoms was approximately 6.5 months. For the relapsing
population (12%), the mean period of symptoms’ remission was 513 days.
Conclusions: The epidemiological parameters of lichen planus in these Portuguese patients
bear similarities with other described populations. No evidence-based therapeutic has proven
to be effective for lichen planus treatment, but topical corticosteroids continue to be the first-
line therapy for this pathology. (Rev Port Estomatol Med Dent Cir Maxilofac. 2021;62(1):29-34)
© 2021 Sociedade Portuguesa de Estomatologia e Medicina Dentária.
Published by SPEMD. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: rebelo.mariana@campus.ul.pt (Mariana Rodrigues Rebelo).
http://doi.org/10.24873/j.rpemd.2021.03.825
1646-2890/© 2021 Sociedade Portuguesa de Estomatologia e Medicina Dentária. Published by SPEMD.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).