MedicalResearch.com Interview with: [caption id="attachment_57894" align="alignleft" width="193"] Dr. Albrecht[/caption] Joerg Albrecht, MD, PhD Dermatologist, Internist, Clinical Pharmacologist Division of Dermatology, Department of Medicine Attending Dermatologist, Chair Division of Dermatology Chair system-wide Pharmacy & Therapeutics Committee Cook County Health Chicago, IL  60612 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: The study was stimulated by data that suggested that an unusually large proportion of inpatient with Hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) were African American. HS is an underdiagnosed disease and the total numbers of inpatients with HS in the year we looked at initially seemed small. So we wanted to test whether this finding held up when the period of observation was extended. Point estimates can be unreliable and we had followed another finding in the data that did not hold up when we looked at other years, so we felt one year was not enough to confirm a trend