We describe three pediatric patients treated successfully with CsA and provide evidence for the use of cyclosporine in children with SJS/TEN. These results further support previous observations that CsA use for SJS/TEN produces consistently favorable outcomes. The results in this case series are limited by their observational nature. Additional trials are needed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of CsA use in children.
crossover study of aprepitant for the treatment of pruritus in patients with Sézary syndrome. The data do not support the efficacy of aprepitant as an antipruritic agent in patients with Sézary syndrome. This is in contrast to at least 7 case series that have reported an improvement in symptoms in a total of 17 patients with Sézary syndrome or mycosis fungoides. 1-5 This study has limitations. Although the study was randomized, blinded, and placebo controlled, the sample size was small including only 5 patients. Because pruritus can vary in patients with Sézary syndrome due to changes in disease activity and external factors such as ambient temperature and humidity, we cannot exclude the impact of these factors on the scoring of pruritus by visual analog scale. We dosed aprepitant daily for 1 week, and we cannot exclude the possibility that the results would have been different if we had used intermittent dosing. In conclusion, in patients with Sézary syndrome, aprepitant treatment may not improve pruritus as reported in previous retrospective observational studies. The unexpected observation of worsened pruritus in patients receiving aprepitant vs placebo warrants larger prospective studies with a similar design to confirm our findings.
The ubiquity and convenience of smartphones carries great potential for collecting patient-reported data to address many gaps in research, especially those that rely on ongoing, real-time data collection. Health care apps have often suffered from low utility due to lack of consideration of the needs of multiple stakeholders. We employed an iterative user-centered design approach to create the myEczema smartphone application (app) to study the burden of disease of atopic dermatitis. We outline below the steps we took for developing myEczema for multiple stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, and researchers.
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