Chest
Clinical Investigations: VascularWegener's Granulomatosis in the Elderly
Section snippets
MATERIALS AND METHODS
A computerized search was performed to identify all patients diagnosed as having WG seen at the University of Michigan Medical Center from January 1983 to February 1994. The elderly group was defined as patients diagnosed as having WG when they were 60 years old or older, and the comparison group consisted of all patients with WG diagnosed at younger than 60 years of age. In keeping with previous studies, inclusion criteria consisted of the following: (1) clinical evidence of inflammatory
Patient Characteristics
Sixty-seven patients were included in the study. Thirty-three of the patients were 60 years old or older, and the remaining 34 patients comprised the younger comparison group. As shown in Table 1, the mean age of the entire population was 52.4 years, while the mean age of the elderly group was 68.4 years (range, 60 to 79 years) and 36.9 years in the control group (range, 9 to 58 years). There was a similar distribution of men and women in both groups.
As expected, the elderly patients had more
DISCUSSION
Overall, our patient population with WG was somewhat older than in previous series, as the mean age was 52.4 years, and half of the patients were diagnosed at age 60 years or older. By contrast, the mean age of 158 patients followed at the National Institutes of Health was 41 years.2 This discrepancy may be due to institution-specific referral patterns, but should not relate to patient selection, since our entry criteria were identical to those used previously. In any case, the elderly
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Biological aging and autoimmunity
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2010, Brocklehurst's Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and GerontologyTherapeutic approach for systemic disease in elderly
2008, Revue de Medecine InterneLong-term outcome of 37 patients with Wegener's granulomatosis with renal involvement
2007, Presse MedicaleCitation Excerpt :Interestingly, our results, like previous reports [3, 12, 18, 23], show that older age at diagnosis independently predicts poorer outcome. Early studies also reported that older individuals have fewer ENT symptoms and more renal dysfunction [26-28], resulting in a predominantly vasculitic disease. We recently hypothesized that predominantly vasculitic WG, including renal involvement, may be predictive of worse outcome than predominantly granulomatous disease involving ENT [18].
Supported by SCOR research grant 1P50-HL46487.
revision accepted July 29.