VIDEO: Combination therapy, tailoring regimen critical in vasculitis treatment

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Number one thing when you think about treatment of vasculitis, the key is to reduce inflammation really quickly, and that will, you know, improve the symptoms and also lessen the damage. And this is often accomplished by using a combination of corticosteroids and other immunosuppressive medicines. And what we use will depend on the type of vasculitis and the organ that is affected by vasculitis. So, the real goals are to tailor the treatment to an individual patient depending on the type of vasculitis, the organs that are affected, and then to get the patient quickly into remission, and then monitor and treat them for both disease and treatment-related complications. Now, when I say corticosteroids, the common medication that people are all aware of is Prednisone. You know, prednisone acts very quickly, and it gets the inflammation under control really quickly. But oftentimes, we have to use large doses and for a prolonged period of time and it's not without any adverse events. You know, many patients experience a lot of side effects from Prednisone, so the trials have actually focused on getting medications that can help lower the Prednisone rather quickly. And so, these medications typically suppress the immune system. And there are several types, and these include medications like cyclophosphamide, azathioprine, mycophenolate mofetil, rituximab (Rituxan; Genentech, Biogen), and avacopan (Tavneos; Amgen). And when you combine the corticosteroids, and these are the medicines that suppress the immune system, you can get the inflammation under control quickly and also taper the steroids rather quickly. Now, the other forms of treatment that, you know, I think people should be aware of is sometimes we exchange the patient's plasma that contains harmful antibodies for healthy plasma. It's like a process similar to dialysis, and it's called plasma exchange. And sometimes, depending on the type of vasculitis, patients may actually require surgery to take care of what we call aneurysms that arise as a result of vasculitis.