The Granulocytes Apheresis Therapy for Ocular Behçet's Disease

Abstract

Abstract: : Purpose: Although the various kinds of intensive studies, the etiology of Behcet’s disease (BD) is still unknown and the visual prognosis of ocular BD patients is pretty poor. It is known that numerous granulocytes are accumulated to the eye in BD patients at the time of ocular attack. Recently, the granulocytes apheresis was reported to be effective for the treatment of severe ulcerative colitis in Japan. We thus performed this therapy to ocular BD patients. Methods: The protocol was examined and then approved on ethical committee in Kyushu University. The BD patients who experienced ocular attacks more than twice for recent 14 weeks were selected and total 6 patients were involved in this study. All patients were male (age: 20-46) and one was complete and the others were incomplete classified BD. For granulocytes apheresis, we used apheresis column that was filled with cellulose acetate beads (Adacolumn®, provided by Japan Immunoresearch Laboratories Co, Ltd.). To determine the therapeutic efficacy, we examined the frequency of ocular attacks during six month "before" and "after" granulocytes apheresis. Results: The mean time of attack in "before" was 5.2±1.7 and "after" was 2.7±1.2 (p<0.05). During the six months after therapy, we have not observed any side effects associated with this therapy. Conclusions: The granulocytes apheresis is effective to reduce the frequency of ocular attack of BD.

Keywords: immunomodulation/immunoregulation • uveitis-clinical/animal model • clinical research methodology