Aside: You say CLIPPERS ...

... I say CHIPPERS.

I'm sure that, before you found this site, you had to wade through lots of Google links for the Los Angeles Clippers and various pieces of personal grooming equipment. So I wondered if a more distinctive acronym could be squeezed out of Chronic Lymphocytic Inflammation with Pontine Perivascular Enhancement Responsive to Steroids. Fortunately, there are many web-sites out there to help with forming acronyms. I used Acronym Creator which worked pretty well.

As I used the same words which make up CLIPPERS as input, some of the results are quite contrived, or don't use all of the terms properly. Still, some of the better ones (which I have adapted slightly) were:

CHIPPERS     Chronic lympHocytic Inflammation with Pontine Perivascular Enhancement Responsive to Steroids

CRIPES       ChRonic lymphocytic Inflammation with Pontine perivascular Enhancement responsive to Steroids 

CaLIPERS     Chronic Lymphocytic Inflammation with Pontine perivascular Enhancement Responsive to Steroids

CHIMERaS     CHronic lymphocytic  InflaMmation with Pontine perivascular Enhancement Responsive to Steroids

fLaPPERS     chronic  Lymphocytic inflammation with Pontine Perivascular Enhancement Responsive to Steroids

CaROLINES     ChROnic Lymphocytic INflammation with pontine perivascular Enhancement responsive to Steroids

CyCLOPS     ChroniC LymphOcytic inflammation with Pontine perivascular enhancement responsiv to Steroids

CavaLIERS     Chronic Lymphocytic Inflammation with pontine perivascular Enhancement Responsive to Steroids

Perhaps inevitably, none of these trip off the tongue quite as well as CLIPPERS. So we are probably stuck with it, at least until someone renames it Pittock-Keegan Syndrome ....

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.

Text Book Case?

Autumnal Shrooms

Another CLIPPERS case study has appeared and the interesting thing about it (to my untrained eye) is that there seems to be nothing interesting about it. In fact, if there was a text-book about CLIPPERS, I would go as far as to say it is a text-book case.

In brief, the subject is a 51 year old man who suffered progressive ataxia, diplopia and weakness before being scanned and revealing the characteristic pattern of CLIPPERS-like lesions in the MR images. There is a lot more detail in the article, but essentially treatment was high-dose (1g/day)  IV Prenisolone for 5 days followed by oral Prednisolone tapering down from 60mg/day and  Azathioprine  introduced in parallel to the tapering. This is basically the treatment I received, except I had a slower taper and a few stops and starts with the Azathioprine (because of blips in my blood-work).

This case is reassuring to see in the sense that many of the more recent case studies have either stretched the definition of CLIPPERS or have been complicated by CLIPPERS being diagnosed after, or alongside, other conditions. It is often difficult to get studies published when they are not sufficiently different to what has come before but, as the authors of this study say, "as a recently defined syndrome, any reported case is .... increasing the awareness of this disorder".

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.