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How do you approach management of patients with lupus and transverse myelitis not responding to pulse dose steroids?

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How do you approach management of patients with lupus and transverse myelitis?

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3 Answers
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Rheumatology · Sidney Kimmel School of Medicine
Answered on

I consider TM or longitudinal myelitis an emergency. I have been pretty aggressive in my treatment with this diagnosis, and have treated a case with pulse steroids, plex, and Cytoxan with excellent outcomes. The main challenge in such situations is differentiating overlapping MS or other autoimmune ...

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Neurology · Yale University School of Medicine
Answered on

In treating transverse myelitis, early aggressive interventions can decrease the long-term neurologic morbidity. If a patient has significant neurologic symptoms, I typically manage with both 5 days of IV methylprednisolone and plasmapheresis. I also perform brain MRI (to evaluate for demyelinating ...

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Rheumatology · MUSC Health
Answered on

Transverse myelitis is one of the few things we still do pheresis for due to the long-term outcome issues. I would check the AQP4 and MOG antibodies and would give a full NIH 6 months of cytoxan followed by maintenance with CellCept. I have used Rituxan as well as a throw the kitchen sink at them du...

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