Help for Eye Disease

BALTIMORE (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Inflammatory eye disease is the fifth-leading cause of blindness in the United States and affects more than 2 million Americans. Many times there is no known cause for the inflammation and patients are desperate for help to save their sight. Now there's a new treatment.

Pat Cronise has been coming to Johns Hopkins University every month for five years. What first brought her here was a startling discovery. "I just woke up one morning and my eye was totally red," she says. "It was scary like, it was just blood red and the vision was getting worse."

Cronise has a potentially blinding inflammatory eye disease called scleritis.

Johns Hopkins University ophthalmologist Jennifer Thorne, M.D., says the steroid prednisone is a common treatment. "It's definitely a two-edged sword," she tells Ivanhoe. "Short term, high doses of prednisone will cause increased appetite, difficulty sleeping, mood swings."

Long-term, prednisone raises the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

Now, CellCept -- a drug used to prevent organ transplant rejection -- can treat eye inflammation and get patients on lower doses of, or even off, prednisone. "The mechanism behind it is just to suppress the immune system," Dr. Thorne says.

A new study shows 96 percent of patients had no inflammation after one month on CellCept. Eighty percent reduced their prednisone to a safer dose. And of those, 50 percent went off prednisone altogether.

Cronise takes CellCept, and as a result, only takes prednisone for occasional flare-ups. She still gets her eyes examined every month, but she's not complaining. She says, "I don't miss it!" and she's thankful she can see it all.

CellCept can help most inflammatory eye diseases including scleritis and uveitis, which are the most common ones. CellCept is FDA approved for organ transplant rejection, but many ophthalmologists are using it off-label to treat inflammatory eye diseases.

This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.

If you would like more information, please contact:

John Lazarou
Johns Hopkins University
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http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/wilmer/