Welcome To 2018

A reminder of warmer times.
It's wall-to-wall rain and sleet currently!

Wow, it's been a long time; in fact I hadn't quite realised how long. 2017 has slipped away with very little fuss. The posts on this blog have been relatively few in the last year which sadly simply reflects that I don't have much to report. My own condition is remaining stable and essentially asymptomatic. My Azathioprine dose has remained at 150mg / day  after being reduced when my doctor got worried about my neutrophil levels. In related good news I have avoided "Aussie" and all other flu variants so far (we are at peak flu season in the UK currently)|. Flu vaccine and careful hygiene, not least as I travel on public transport daily, have done their job.

In terms of wider CLIPPERS news, there is still a trickle of journal papers. The most common topics are case reports on single patients (typically those who don't fit the standard CLIPPERS pattern in some way), proposals for tighter diagnostic guidelines and papers discussing the possible links between lymphoma-type disease and CLIPPERS. I did a quick search and in the last three years the number of full journal papers on CLIPPERS seems quite stable at 4 (2015), 5 (2016) and 6 (2017). (There are likely more short conference papers which are harder to track).

I get the impression, admittedly without much hard evidence, that treatment is becoming more standardised, at least in the acute early phases of CLIPPERS. Managing people like us long-term is more variable, both in the range of treatments available and our collective responses to them! I have a meeting with my consultant in a few months so will pick his brain for any updates from the medical perspective.

Thanks for sticking with the blog and if anyone has any ideas for contents or wants to write an entry, let me know and we'll sort something out.

Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.


Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.