What is relapsing polychondritis
When talking about relapsing polychondritis, it refers to the medical term used to describe a rare degenerative disease indicated by the repeated inflammation of our body’s cartilage. The disease will affect any cartilages that are present inside our body. For example, people who are suffering with relapsing polychondritis will experience ‘loosening’ of their ears, larynx and trachea while the bridge of the nose may collapse and form a ‘saddle nose’ appearance. Besides that, this disease may also affect your aortic heart valve and cause you a heart problem.
Relapsing polychondritis also can be known as:
- Von Meyenburg Disease
- Relapsing perichondritis
- Meyenburg-Altherr-Uehlinger Syndrome
- Generalized or systemic Chondromalacia
- Chronic atrophic polychondritis
The signs and symptoms for the disease commonly start with the sudden sensation of pain, tenderness and bulging of the cartilage in one or both of your ears. The tenderness will later expand to the fleshy part of your outer ear resulting in it to become narrow. The inflammation may happen for some days or several weeks before calming slowly. If the attack happened at the middle ear, you may experience a blockage of the eustachian tube. Frequent inflammation of the ear will cause hearing loss.
For nasal chondritis, it can be characterized by the collapse of the cartilage at the bridge of your nose that gives you a saddle nose appearance fullness of the nasal and crusting. Relapsing polychondritis may happen to both small and large joints in your body. It will give you the symptoms that are similar to all of those arthritis disorders for example pain and swelling at the site of inflammation.
If the attack was spreading to the cartilage of the larynx and bronchial tubes, you may find that it is quite difficult to breathe and speak. In some cases, the disease may also affect the heart valve resulting in you suffering from heart abnormalities. Apart from that, inflammation and dysfunction of the kidney may also happen as the consequences of the disease. Because of that, it is important for you to go for a health screening if you are having the symptom as stated above.
To date, the main cause of relapsing polychondritis is still unknown. For all this while, it is assumed as an autoimmune disease that happens when our body’s defence mechanism attacks the healthy tissue in our body for a reason that is unknown. Some research done showed that the disease may have a relationship with abnormal reactions of our blood cells, linked to a thyroid protein, cell walls of the organs and adrenal cells. The symptoms of relapsing polychondritis will only appear if there is any of our cartilages being attacked by our body’s autoantibodies.
Relapsing polychondritis affecting the population in an equal number. There is a similar rate between male and female that was affected by the disease for all this while. Most of the patients with this disease usually will get the symptoms between forty until sixty years of age.
For the treatment, doctors usually will administer some corticosteroid drugs, aspirin and also non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for example dapsone itself or combination with colchicine. However, for people who are currently in a severe condition, doctors will use a treatment regime that functions to suppress our body’s immune systems for example cyclophosphamide, 6-mercaptopurine and azathioprine. If it comes to worst, including the involvement of a heart valve, the treatment is mainly targeted to replace the heart valves or inserting a breathing tube into the trachea to prevent collapsed airways from happening.
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