Tuesday 16 September 2014

Historical CLIPPERS cases

Holiday snap from Southern Italy
I recently read an interesting short communication entitled "CLIPPERS among patients diagnosed with non-specific CNS neuroinflammatory diseases" by Dr Kerrn-Jespersen and colleagues from hospitals in Denmark. As regular readers of this blog will know, the term "CLIPPERS" was first used in 2010 in the now well-known paper by Dr Pittock and colleagues. They observed a consistent pattern of symptoms and treatment responses in a group of patients over several years which led them to the conclusion that a single previously unreported condition was responsible. 

CLIPPERS is very rare, which is presumably why it was not identified earlier. However, it is reasonable to suspect that there were other cases out there "in the wild" before 2010; these cases were presumably either diagnosed as something else or diagnosed as some generic inflammatory condition. In the Danish paper, the authors searched their hospital records between 1999 and 2013 for cases with descriptions reminiscent of CLIPPERS. After some investigation they found 3 patients (= 12.5% of their initial list of suspects) who justified being reclassified with a CLIPPERS diagnosis. This number may seem small, but it is from a limited number of European centres over a limited time-period and suggests there could be significant further cases out there.
 
Perhaps the most important practical outcome of the study for us patients is that the follow-up of their 3 cases confirmed that early and sustained treatment was important to minimise longer-term problems.

Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.

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