About 25-30% of patients with immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) are refractory to corticosteroids, splenectomy and other treatments. It has been suggested that interferon-alpha 2b (IFN-alpha 2b) may be useful in the treatment of chronic refractory ITP patients. We treated 9 chronic refractory ITP patients with IFN-alpha 2b: the results were poor.

Background. Acute immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) is a common, benign, self-limiting disease in children. Chronic ITP is diagnosed when thorombocytopenia persists beyond 12 months. Older age is associated with increased risk for development of chronic ITP. The main objective of the current study was to examine whether total leukocyte (TLC) and absolute lymphocyte counts (ALC) at diagnosis...

First-line therapies of acute and chronic idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) include intravenous immunoglobulin, IV anti-D and corticosteroids. A short-course high-dose dexamethasone (HDD-SC) therapy has recently been reported to be efficacious in acute ITP. The present study was conducted to assess the efficacy of HDD-SC in children with chronic ITP. Over a period of 10 months, 13 patie...

BACKGROUND Current guidelines recommend glucocorticoids and splenectomy as standard 1(st) and 2(nd) line treatments for chronic immune thrombocytopenia (ITP). We sought to find out how German ITP-patients are treated with respect to these guidelines. METHODS Members of a patient support association ≥18 years with a self-reported history of chronic ITP>12 months were surveyed with a web-based ...

Clinical definitions and terminology vary greatly in clinical studies on idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP). An objective assessment of this heterogeneity may be of interest, providing a basis for standardizing ITP terminology. A systematic review of the recent literature on ITP in adults was carried out. The following items were extracted from the articles for comparison: platelet count...

Childhood immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is an autoimmune bleeding disorder. Most children recover with initial treatment, but the individual course is hard to predict. The objectives were to study the clinical profile of children with Primary ITP and to identify factors that may predict poor response to initial treatment. Methods: It is a retrospective & prospective study done in a tertiary hos...

Immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) is an autoimmune disorder characterized by isolated thrombocytopenia. The estimated incidence is 100 cases per 1,000,000 patients, and half of the cases are seen in children. In children, the gender distribution is equal, whereas in adults, women are three times more likely to be affected than are men. ITP is defined as chronic if it lasts for longer than 6...

We report the results of four cycles of rituximab therapy in eleven patients with chronic warm antibody type autoimmune hemolytic anemia (AIHA) and six patients with chronic idiopathic thrombocytopenia (ITP). The overall response rate was 64% in the AIHA group (3 complete responses and 4 partial responses) and 83% in the ITP group (4 complete responses, 1 partial response). Responses in AIHA pa...

Immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is an autoimmune disease where platelets are destroyed prematurely. In the majority of children the disease resolves, but in some it becomes chronic. To investigate whether these 2 phases of the disease are molecularly similar or separate entities we performed DNA microarray analysis (GEO accession number: GSE46922) of T-cells from newly diagnosed children and chil...