Digital booklets
Four of the 5 digital booklets I have written are updates of the previous edition of my book Patch testing. When I first self-published the third edition with acdegroot publishing, a 'company' which actually meant (virtually) nothing, I promised everyone who would buy a book free digital updates. Indeed, I have written 4 such updates and made them freely available to everyone through a download option. I made sure that when the next update came out there would always be an announcement in Dermatitis (I got along very well with the Editor-in-Chief Ponciano 'Chito' Cruz) and soon after that I always sold a number of books on my website www.patchtesting.info. The first 3 updates belonged to the third edition from 2008. The 2008-2015 update was even published in Dermatitis (De Groot AC. New contact allergens: 2008 to 2015. Dermatitis 2015;26:199-215). I had not submitted it as a manuscript, but Chito apparently thought it suitable and asked me if he could publish it in Dermatitis. Well, please!
I wrote the 2018-2022 update after the release of Monographs in contact allergy, part 4, Systemic drugs., because this book contained a lot of material that I had not yet included in Patch testing fourth edition from 2018. The fourth edition together with the 2018-2022 update forms the fifth edition of Patch testing, which is not commercially available (only friends, relatives and some colleagues have received a printed copy), but can be consulted online (for members) on the websites of the European Society of Contact Dermatitis and the American Contact Dermatitis Society.
Patch testing updates
- De Groot AC. Patch testing, 3rd Edition: Update 2008-2010. Wapserveen: acdegroot publishing, 2011
- De Groot AC. Patch Testing, 3rd Edition: Update 2008-2012. Wapserveen: acdegroot publishing, 2013
- De Groot AC. Patch Testing, 3rd Edition: Update 2008 – 2015. Wapserveen, The Netherlands: acdegroot publishing, 2015 (33 pages). ISBN/EAN: 978-90-813233-2-1
- De Groot AC. Patch testing, 4th Edition: Update 2018 – 2022. Wapserveen, The Netherlands: acdegroot publishing, 2022 (37 pages). ISBN/EAN 978-90-813233-7-6
Ingredients of propolis
The fifth digital booklet is the following:
De Groot AC, Popova MP, Bankova VS. An update on the constituents of poplar-type propolis. Wapserveen, The Netherlands: acdegroot publishing, 2014 (11 pages). ISBN/EAN: 978-90-813233-0-7
Raw propolis. Photo derived from van amazon.nl
In 2013 I had written a review article about contact allergy to and the composition of propolis (bee glue): De Groot AC. Propolis: a review of properties, applications, chemical composition, contact allergy, and other adverse effects. Dermatitis 2013;24:263-282. Some time after that I was approached by Prof. Vassya Stefanova Bankova. She is a Bulgarian chemist, specialized in the chemistry of natural products (propolis is one such natural product) and president of the Bulgarian Phytochemical Society. She said that there were some mistakes in my listing of the ingredients of propolis. I then proposed to her that I would do an extensive literature search on propolis, make a digital booklet of it and that she and her colleague Popova would check and improve everything, and so it happened.
I then wrote a letter to Dermatitis describing this situation (De Groot AC. Chemicals found in poplar-type propolis. Dermatitis 2014;25:280) and invited everyone to download the booklet (I had requested an ISBN/EAN), of which Bankova and Popova co-authored, free of charge.