Active clinical trials for "Giant Cell Arteritis"

This study aims to explore the clinical and immunological efficacy of low-dose Interleukin-2 (IL-2) on polymyalgia rheumatica.

Rheumatic Polymyalgia(PMR) is a relatively common chronic inflammatory disorder of unknown origin which predominantly develops in elderly subjects and presents with severe pain and stiffness in the neck, shoulder and pelvic girdles, along with increased acute phase reactants. Systemic manifestations such as fever, anorexia and weight loss are characteristic signatures of PMR. Corticosteroids (CS) constitute the standard treatment of PMR. Although in most patients the symptoms of the disease disappear after one or two years of treatment, a proportion of patients remain CS-dependent with the subsequent CS toxicity. Open label studies have suggested that tumour necrosis factor (TNF) antagonists lead to sustained improvement and CS sparing effect in patients with refractory PMR. The investigators conducted a randomised, double-blind, placebo controlled trial with infliximab in CS-dependent patients with PMR. Patients with CS-dependent PMR (defined as requiring ≥ 5 mg/day after at least 2 years of treatment to maintain remission or ≥ 7.5 mg/day after at least 6 months) were randomly assigned to receive Infliximab (5 mg/kg i.v) at 0, 2, 6, 14 and 22 weeks (n = 12) or placebo (n = 11) together with CS that were reduced according to a predefined schedule. The primary outcome was the proportion of responder patients -defined as individuals with both complete clinical and analytical remission without receiving CS for at least three months- at 24 weeks. Secondary outcomes were cumulative CS doses and adverse events proportion.

Giant cells arteritis or Horton disease is a vasculitis that affects great vessels. This is the most frequent vasculitis of the population over the age of 50. This vasculitis is at the origin of an inflammatory infiltrate of arterial tunics, essentially composed of lymphocytes. Clinical signs are a deterioration of general state, unusual cephalgias, jaw pain, scalp hyperesthesia, but can also be serious ischemic complication, especially ophthalmologic with the possibility to go blind. Until now, the standard treatment is a high dosage corticosteroid therapy. Diagnosis is based on criterias of the American College of Rheumatology, dating back to 1990. The relapse rate is important, ranging from 10 to 64 % according to studies. There are also issues of becoming dependent on steroid. So it is important to determine new diagnosis markers and a therapeutic following of giant cells arteritis. With this study several biomarkers of inflammation will be studied in order to determine if one ore many of them have a good sensitivity and special feature for diagnosis and following of giant cells arteritis. The main goal is to determine a new diagnosis marker for giant cells arteritis.

Giant cell arteritis , also named Horton's disease, is the most common vasculitis in subjects over 50 years old. The incidence increases with age : from 188 to 290 cases per million inhabitants per year, with a North-South gradient. The major risk of Horton's disease is blindness, unilateral, occurring in 15 to 20% of cases, sometimes preceded by episodes of transient amaurosis. The decrease in visual acuity is often brutal, irreversible and bilateral in 25 to 50% of cases. The mechanism of this blindness is an arterial ischemia: Acute Anterior Ischemic Optic Neuropathy acute anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy (90%), acute retro-bulbar ischaemic optic neuropathy (5%), occlusion of the central artery of the retina (5%). The pathogenesis of this brutal ischemia is not fully understood. One of the hypotheses suggests that, during stimulation by an antigen of the environment, preactivated dendritic cells of the arterial wall would stimulate T lymphocytes. These will recruit cells that cause an inflammatory infiltrate polymorphic predominant at the media level. These lesions may be accompanied by destruction of the internal elastic lamina, with inconstant but pathognomonic presence of multinucleated giant cells. All arteries with internal elastic lamina can be affected by parietal inflammation, which results in stenosis and occlusion, explaining the ischemia. The visual loss is usually abrupt and very severe, leaving the patient with definitely very low or no residual visual acuity. Conventional treatment currently recommended includes systemic corticosteroid therapy at 1 mg / kg / day, preceded or not by 500 mg pulses of methylprednisolone , and associated with antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapy (LMWH). Despite the decline in visual acuity thus occurred is then always final. Certainly loss of vision has a major impact on the quality of life of patients. Apart from this lymphocytic inflammation, a process of vascular remodeling is at the origin of the vascular occlusion phenomenon. The endothelin system is a family of amino acids including 3 members: ET1, ET2 and ET3. ET1 is a potent vasoconstrictor. ET1 receptors (ETA and ETB) are expressed in the arteries of patients with giant cell arteritis . The expression of ET1 associated with proliferation of muscle cells in arteries will decrease under the effect of endothelin inhibitors. This has been shown during treatment of pulmonary hypertension. In giant cell arteritis , the endothelin system continues to be very active up to 8 days despite the introduction of systemic corticosteroids. Bosentan is a mixed endothelin receptor antagonist with affinity for both ETA and ETB receptors. This inhibitor is used in treatment of pulmonary artery hypertension, digital ulcerations of systemic sclerosis and critical peripheral arterial ischemia.

The study will examine the efficacy of a single intramuscular injection of betamethasone dipropionate/betamethasone sodium phosphate at the dose of 20mg/8mg (injection volume 4 ml) as an induction therapy in patients with polymyalgia rheumatica. Twenty patients will be randomized to receive an injection of betamethasone or placebo (isotonic NaCl solution) immediately after diagnosis. Both groups will receive the standard-of-care steroid therapy, starting from 10 mg of prednisone every day (qd), tapered down by 2.5 mg monthly if the disease is not active (scheduled monthly follow-ups by a rheumatologist). Primary outcome measures: the total cumulative dose of glucocorticosteroids and disease duration.

The factors underlying the large interindividual variability in response to glucocorticoids in Giant Cell Arteritis are poorly understood. The investigators hypothesize that a part of this variability is related to pharmacokinetic factors determined by genetic polymorphism: hepatic clearance involving cytochromes P450 of the subfamily 3A (CYP3A) and drug efflux leukocyte conditioned by P-glycoprotein involved in multidrug resistance drugs (ABCB1). The investigators have designed a multicentric prospective pharmacokinetical and pharmacogenetic cohort study to assess the link between prednisolone clearance and the relapse risk in giant cell arteritis.

The aim of this study is to compare the use of FDG PET/CT to Ga-68 HA-DOTATATE (abbreviated DOTATATE) PET/CT in patients with active giant cell arteritis (GCA) started on prednisone to understand if DOTATATE can identify more areas of active blood vessel inflammation than FDG.

OBJECTIVES: I. Determine whether there is prompt engraftment after autologous peripheral blood stem cell transplantation using filgrastim (G-CSF) mobilization in patients with life threatening autoimmune diseases. II. Determine the kinetics of T- and B-cell immune reconstitution after a combination of timed plasmapheresis, high dose cyclophosphamide and total lymphoid irradiation, and posttransplant immunosuppression with cyclosporine in these patients. III. Determine whether this treatment regimen beneficially influences the clinical course of these patients.

Giant cell arteritis (GCA or temporal arteritis or cranial arteritis) or Horton disease is a vasculitis that occurs in older adults, affecting vessels of medium and large caliber. The diagnosis of GCA is a challenge for general practitioners and specialists. Since 1970, it is based on a combination of clinical, biological and histological signs. Temporal artery biopsy (TAB) was the reference method until recently. However, TAB has many drawbacks. Therefore, researches of the past 20 years have been intended to develop alternative diagnostic methods. This was notably the case of the color Doppler ultrasound (CDU) since the description by Wolfgang Schmidt of the halo sign. Although European and British recommendations put CDU as second line method, many authors suggest the possibility to do without TAB in many cases. In addition, many practitioners believe that it is not "ethical" to use an invasive unprofitable procedure like TAB, and have already been using CDU in their routine practice. However, no diagnostic algorithm validating this approach in a prospective series has been published to date. Therefore, the present study aim at validating a diagnostic algorithm of giant cell arteritis using color Doppler imaging of temporal arteries and cervicocephalic axes as first screening method.

Repeat MRI of the Superficial temporal Artery in 5 volunteers