In clinical practice, bilateral temporal artery duplex served the same function as biopsy, but without subjecting patients to the potential morbidity of a surgical procedure. Temporal artery biopsy could be reserved only for situations where the duplex result is inconsistent with the clinical picture, and the biopsy result, if different from the duplex result, might influence the treatment decision.
Adding specialist clinical evaluation and color duplex ultrasonography to the standard diagnostic workup for temporal arteritis creates a rapid, noninvasive, resource-sensible means to diagnose giant cell arteritis, to improve temporal artery biopsy yield, and to decrease the total number of biopsies done. The diagnosis can be made in some cases by clinical evaluation and color duplex ultrasonography alone, thereby saving the patient an unnecessary surgical procedure. Protocols such as this can be implemented by multidisciplinary cooperation in a patient-centered, integrated system.
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