TY - JOUR T1 - THerapeutic interventions for systemic vasculitis AU - Hoffman GS Y1 - 2010/12/01 N1 - 10.1001/jama.2010.1676 JO - JAMA SP - 2413 EP - 2414 VL - 304 IS - 21 N2 - Nonetheless, 50 years of earlier descriptive reports had revealed that certain forms of vasculitis were uniformly fatal without therapy. Consequently, studies with untreated controls were considered unethical. Despite these shortcomings, important information emerged from the pre-1990 era. For instance, several studies demonstrated that without treatment, diseases such as Wegener granulomatosis (WG)1 and microscopic polyangiitis (MPA)2 were often fatal within weeks to months. These sobering outcomes were especially common among patients who presented with pulmonary-renal syndromes, gastrointestinal ischemia, or central nervous system involvement. In addition, while glucocorticosteroid discovery and clinical application was a major breakthrough for many illnesses, it was not effective for the most severe types of systemic vasculitis. Many patients with critical organ involvement still died within months. SN - 0098-7484 M3 - doi: 10.1001/jama.2010.1676 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.2010.1676 ER -