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Primary Biliary Cirrhosis Treated with Low-Dose Oral Pulse Methotrexate
- Marshall M. Kaplan, MD;
- Tamsin A. Knox, MD; and
- Sanjeev Arora, MD
Excerpt
There is no totally effective treatment for primary biliary cirrhosis, a chronic, progressive liver disease that most often affects middle-aged women (1). Patients treated with colchicine show improved results on biochemical tests of liver function, and colchicine appears to slow the progression of this disease, but it does not improve symptoms or liver histology (2, 3). We recently reported (4) that low-dose oral pulse methotrexate produced clinical, biochemical, and histologic remission in two patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis. Because there are clinical and immunologic similarities between primary sclerosing cholangitis and primary biliary cirrhosis (5), we studied two women with symptomatic
This 100-word excerpt has been provided in the absence of an abstract.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments: The authors thank Drs. Karim Fawaz and Peter Brem for referring these patients; Ms. Jane Bankoff-Popkin and Ms. Carol Nichols for manuscript preparation; and Dr. Andrew Leiter for help with the figure.
Article and Author Information
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From the New England Medical Center Hospitals and Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts. For current author addresses, see end of text.
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Grant Support: Partial support by Research Training Grant DK 07024 and Clinical Study Unit Grant RR 300054 from the National Institutes of Health.
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Requests for Reprints: Marshall M. Kaplan, MD, Gastroenterology Division, Box 233, New England Medical Center Hospitals, 750 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02111.
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Current Author Addresses: Drs. Kaplan and Knox: Gastroenterology Division, Box 233, New England Medical Center Hospitals, 750 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02111.
Dr. Arora: Gastroenterology Division, Box 239, New England Medical Center Hospitals, 750 Washington Street, Boston, MA 02111.
