title: Phototherapy for the treatment of cutaneous graft versus host disease.
abstract: Graft versus host disease (GvHD) occurs in half the patients who receive allogenic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation and is a major contributor for the morbidity and mortality in these patients. Immunosuppressant therapy cannot suppress all the manifestations of GvHD and new ways of treating the condition are needed. The focus of this review is the treatment of cutaneous GvHD through phototherapy. Of the six acute and ten chronic cutaneous GvHD case series examined the overall trend was that phototherapy was able to reduce the presence of cutaneous lesions of GvHD and, as a consequence, steroid use could be reduced. This provides a positive outlook for phototherapy as a treatment for cutaneous GvHD but there is a need for future studies to include larger numbers of patients in order to obtain more data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Dermatology, Westmead Hospital, Westmead, New South Wales, Australia; Sydney Medical School-Westmead, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
authors.forename: Kieran B
authors.initials: KB
authors.lastname: Garbutcheon-Singh
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fernández-Peñas
mesh_terms: D000208:Acute Disease; D002908:Chronic Disease; D006086:Graft vs Host Disease / Q000628:therapy*; D018380:Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation / Q000009:adverse effects*; D006801:Humans; D011701:PUVA Therapy; D012871:Skin Diseases / Q000628:therapy*; D014467:Ultraviolet Therapy
keywords: cutaneous graft versus host disease; phototherapy