Introduction
Oral colchicine therapy has been shown effective both in controlling the symptoms and preventing the development of amyloidosis in FMF. However, 5 to 10% of FMF patients are resistant to this conventional therapy.
Objectives
The objective of this study is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of weekly intravenous colchicine (IVC) adjunct therapy for more than one year.
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Methods
We retrospectively reviewed records of our day-hospitalization from 2007 to 2012 for patients with FMF unresponsive to oral treatment who were treated with supplemental 1mg IVC (120 min infusion) once a week. We tabulated records of clinical events: fever, number of attacks per month and CRP levels before and after at least one year of this treatment. Adverse events were also recorded, and compared with a matched control population of FMF patients only treated with oral colchicine.
Results
Twelve patients were identified. Two with poor compliance were excluded. Mean age was 39; 70% male. Mean daily dose of oral colchicine was 2.1mg. Mean duration of treatment with IVC was 2.1 years. The number of attacks per month decreased by 68% (4 versus 1.3, before and after respectively, p< 0.008). One patient exhibited an adverse event: deep vein thrombosis of lower extremity.
Conclusion
Although IVC is a controversial option as treatment for oral-colchicine- non-responsive FMF patients, our study provides evidence of efficacy and relative safety for this modality as long term treatment ,in young FMF patients without comorbidities treated in an academic center, experimented with the use of IVC
Disclosure of interest
None declared
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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.