Photo Credit: Vera Tikhonova
The following is a summary of “Patients With Chronic Spontaneous Urticaria Who Have Wheals, Angioedema, or Both, Differ Demographically, Clinically, and in Response to Treatment—Results From CURE,” published in the November 2023 issue of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology by Buttgereit, et al.
People with chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU) get spontaneous wheals (W), angioedema (AE), or both for more than 6 weeks. Some clinical changes still need to be known between people with W, AE, or both (W+AE). To determine how W, AE, and W+AE CSU patients are similar or different in demographics, disease traits, comorbidities, disease load, and treatment reaction.
For a study, researchers sought baseline information from 3,698 CSU patients who were part of the ongoing, prospective, international, multicenter, observational Chronic Urticaria REgistry (CURE) study (data cut: September 2022).
Out of all the people in the CSU, 59% had W+AE, 36% had W, and 5% had AE. Compared to W and AE patients, W+AE patients had the lowest ratio of men to women (0.33), the highest rates of psychiatric disease (17% vs. 11% vs. 6%), autoimmune disease (13% vs. 7% vs. 9%), and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) hypersensitivity (9% vs. 5% vs 2%), and the worst effects of the disease. Compared to W+AE and AE patients, W patients had the lowest rates of obesity (11% vs. 16% vs. 17%, respectively) and high blood pressure (15% vs. 21% vs 40%, respectively). They also had the highest rate of inducible urticaria (24% vs 22% vs 6%, respectively), and their W length was shorter. It was found that AE patients were older when they first got sick, had AEs that lasted longer, and responded best to higher amounts of H1-antihistamines (58% vs. 24% vs. 31%) and omalizumab (92% vs. 67% vs. 60%, respectively).
The results helped them understand CSU traits better, which could help with patient care and studies that tried to connect them to harmful factors.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2213219823009248
