 |
| Rainy London |
To counteract the grey skies, shortening days and dipping temperatures in the UK, there has been a hint of progress in our understanding of CLIPPERS. In their paper Effective antituberculous therapy in a patient with CLIPPERS: New insights into CLIPPERS pathogenesis, Dr Mele and colleagues describe a CLIPPERS case which was initially diagnosed and treated as suffering from CNS tuberculosis. After 18 months of treatment the patient no longer had significant symptoms and only slight MRI abnormalities.
The interesting thing is that 6 months after tuberculosis treatment was stopped, the patient relapsed and then improved again when tuberculosis treatment was restarted. My reading of the paper is that the first treatment round should have guaranteed that no tuberculosis was present yet they still improved when treated for it again. At this point the patient was re-appraised and treated for CLIPPERS with Prednisolone at which point more marked improvement was seen.
So the interesting result is that improvement in a CLIPPERS patient was seen whilst being treated with drugs not usually used for CLIPPERS. The authors note that one of these drugs (rifampicin) is anti-inflammatory and is also thought to be helpful for rheumatoid arthritis. They speculate in some detail about the possible mechanisms by which this drug may operate.
This is a very interesting article and I don't pretend to understand the detail. As I am not a doctor, there may be short-comings that I don't appreciate (not least the usual problems of diagnosis) so some caution is required. However, the authors should be applauded for not claiming too much. They report a single interesting case and discuss possible consequences including the potential use of response to rifampicin in diagnosis, but do not go over the top. In my opinion, this work is perhaps more valuable for providing possible clues and new directions for research rather than suggesting alternative CLIPPERS treatments. It is also the sort of paper that may well attract some interesting letters from other academics in the next few months. I will keep watch.
Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.
Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
