Friday, May 15, 2009

Two new articles: Treating BD with contraceptives, and an update on different treatments

I just came across two new articles dealing with the treatment of Behcet's symptoms. The first one is available online for free; the second article is only available as an epub online purchase (it hasn't been published in hardcopy yet), although I'm providing the abstract below for educational purposes, along with a link to purchase the full article on your own.

  1. Managing Behcet's disease: An update on current and emerging treatment options
    P LA van Daele, JH Kappen, PM van Hagen, J AM van Laar
    Therapeutics and Clinical Risk Management, 2009:5 385-390.
    Article is available in full, for free, at:
    http://www.dovepress.com/getfile.php?fileID=4792


  2. Behcet's disease: Remission of patient symptoms after oral contraceptive therapy
    Oh SH, Kwon JY, Lee JH, Han EC, Bang D.
    Clinical and Experimental Dermatology. 2009 May 5. [Epub ahead of print]
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19438558 (abstract)
    You can purchase this 3-page article for $29.95 at the Wiley InterScience web site through this link: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/user/accessdenied?ID=122373858&Act=2138&Code=4717&Page=/cgi-bin/fulltext/122373858/PDFSTART

    [JZ: Note: This is a case report of ONE patient who was successfully treated with oral contraceptives. The treatment may or may not work for anyone else; using contraceptives made no difference in my own flares. I know many women whose flares are related to their menstrual cycles, though, so it's probably worth discussing it with your doctor(s).]

    Summary: We report a patient with Behcet's disease (BD) who went into remission after administration of oral contraceptives. About 2 years after the diagnosis of BD, she developed dysfunctional uterine bleeding with menometrorrhagia, during which oral and genital ulcers and erythema nodosum-like lesions persisted without remission. The oral contraceptive that was prescribed to control her irregular menstruation also suppressed outbreaks of ulcers and erythema nodosum-like lesions. This case suggests that sex hormones might be considered as one of the aggravating or inducing factors in BD.

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