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| Making bread while I wait for more CLIPPERS news. |
Happy New Year - it's been a while. I'm afraid everything has been a bit quiet recently.
Anyway, new year, new post, new case-study. When I finally got around to reading this paper I was pleasantly surprised for two reasons. First, if you have been hanging around here for a while and caught up with some of the jargon, it has a quite concise review of the state of CLIPPERS knowledge in 2016. Second, the treatment strategy is more like my own experience than most of the other reports out there.
In this study a 46 year-old woman first had problems with horizontal eye movement . She had dizziness and problems with gait which developed over 4 months. So this lady was eventually treated with high-dose Prednisolone (in fact in three phases of 500mg/day, 250mg/day and 120mg/day over 3 weeks in total) followed by tapering oral steroids which resulted in very good improvement of symptoms. The patient remained stable on Azathioprine (which was introduced while still on Prednisolone) for at least 6 months - i.e. the length of time reported in the paper. This is far too short a time-period in CLIPPERS to be very significant but encouraging nonetheless. The authors note that treatment with Azathioprine is rarely reported but they consider it important (and I agree) to investigate drugs which may work in the absence of corticosteroids, at least in some patients.
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.
