Relapses in patients with idiopathic vasculitis: diagnostic difficulties.
Idiopathic vasculitis are complex inflammatory diseases that affect small, medium and large sized vessels. The disease recurrence, or relapse, which frequently characterizes the vasculitis course, raises the morbidity and mortality in vasculitic patients. Relapse diagnosis is currently a difficult clinical problem, since the original vasculitis presentation may change during relapse, in some cases even to a more aggressive form. Furthermore, relapse may overlap "damage" syndromes and subclinical active lesions can occur in asymptomatic patients. We focus here on certain organ-specific and systemic manifestations associated to relapse, also presenting unusual and unexpected features of relapse in various vasculitic conditions. Assessment of disease activity to diagnose relapse, including serologic markers associated to or predicting relapse, and relapse diagnosis in subclinical vasculitis are also discussed.
Internal Medicine Clinic, Colentina Hospital, "Carol Davila" University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bucharest, Romania. ioan.matei@hotmail.com
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D015415:Biomarkers / Q000097:blood; D006801:Humans; D012008:Recurrence; D012074:Remission Induction; D014657:Vasculitis / Q000097:blood / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000628:therapy
D015415:Biomarkers