Skin lesions, angioedema, eosinophilia, and hypocomplementemia

Hypocomplementemic Vasculitis and Renal Involvement

“…Patients with hypocomplementemic urticarial vasculi tis have been treated with steroids [8,9] or a combination of steroids and azathioprine, apparently with good con trol of the dermic symptoms. The renal symptomatology either has been improved in some cases or slowed down in some cases with the above-mentioned therapy.…”

Complement activation profiles in disease.

“…Agnello et al (1971) described an unusual immune complex disease with the features listed in Table 2. Several other cases (Marder et al, 1976;Geha and Akl, 1976) with identical complement changes have since been reported and their clinical similarity suggests that this may be a unique syndrome. The Clq binding and consuming agent may be an unusual IgG molecule binding to Clq via its Fc end (Marder et al, 1978).…”

Membranous Nephropathy Associated with Hypocomplementemic Urticarial Vasculitis: Report of Two Cases and a Review of the Literature

“…Many patients had normal renal function. However, 6 cases (8%) [4,5,7,8,10,12] showed deteriorated renal function, and 1 case [12] had end-stage renal failure requiring hemodialysis. Thus, de spite the general concept that renal involvement with H U V has been relatively benign, careful observation is required as in the case o f SLE .…”

“…Thus, de spite the general concept that renal involvement with H U V has been relatively benign, careful observation is required as in the case o f SLE . Sixteen patients (18 cases) had histologically proven glomerular involvement [2,4,[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], O f the various histopathologic types reported from 1973 to 1990, mesangial proliferative glomerulonephritis has been most frequently found, whereas membranous type was found only in 2 cases [8,13]. With regard to the therapy and prognosis o f renal involvement, prednisolone plus cyclo phosphamide or azathioprine lowered serum creatinine level [5,7,11] but did not improve serum complement [11], In contrast, a case associated with severe proliferative glomer ulonephritis was refractory to 70 mg prednisolone every other day and progressed to end-stage renal function which required hemodialysis [12].…”