Clinical dermatology: retinoids and other treatments--25 years.

Clinical Dermatology: Retinoids and other Treatments started 25 years ago to provide rapid and authoritative information on all aspects of the newly emerging synthetic retinoid. These were principally isotretinoin and etretinate. However, a number of other experimental retinoids were reported. The editorial team was Dr Andrew Griffiths, Professor Nicholas Lowe, Professor Ronald Marks and Professor Bill Cunliffe. This enabled a wide coverage of clinical and research interest. With the rapidly expanding literature in this area we soon realised that we needed editorial assistance with the highly technical basic science literature. We invited Professor Ed Wood to join us and he later took over the principal editorship until his untimely death in December 2008.

The scope of the journal broadened as other products of interest appeared and in the last few years, the title was updated to enable articles of more general interest to be included. For the 25th Anniversary issues, each of my original co-editors will, in turn, take the lead editorially.

For this issue, I have selected an article that has drawn much interest (after excluding my special interest of Pityriasis rubra pilaris). For the gallery I have chosen before and after pictures of a patient with chronic hand eczema treated with the new retinoid alitretinoin. This is an exciting development that takes retinoid therapy in an entirely new direction. Recent advances in the treatment of chronic hand eczema are looked at in more detail in a feature contributed by Christine Clark. In addition to reviews on a selection of recent papers. We also include a conference report from the 4th International Cosmeceuticals Summit, where many areas of interest to skin biologists were covered.