Sarcoidosis in Israel: Clinical outcome status, organ involvement and long term follow up

This study reviewed the clinical outcome status (COS) and organ involvement of Israeli sarcoidosis patients during a five year period. Then, we compared our results to the WASOG COS and the ACCESS instruments in order to evaluate their relevance to the Israeli population.Methods: The retrospective study group consisted of 166 patients from 2010 to 2015. All patients with clinical presentation of sarcoidosis were included. Data on demographic characteristics, presenting symptoms, co-morbidities, disease duration, lung function tests, treatment program, chest X-ray and chest high resolution computed tomography (HRCT) were collected.Results: The median patient age was 62±14, which was significantly higher than the WASOG and ACCESS cohorts (p<0.0001) and the average disease duration was 9.8±7.5 years. Resembling the ACCESS cohort, most patients were women (67.5%). The majority (143/166) of patients suffered from constitutional symptoms including weight loss (4.8%), fatigue (1.8%), joint pain (5.4%), as well as shortness of breath, cough and hemoptysis (38.5%). Similarly to the ACCESS cohort, 91% of patients presented with lung involvement. However, significant differences in the other organs' involvement were noted, including lymph nodes (3% vs. 15.2%), liver (3.6% vs. 11.5%), CNS (7.2% vs. 4.6%) and joints (3.6% vs. 0.5%). In addition, significant differences were observed in the COS of the Israeli population in comparison to the WASOG data (p<0.01).conclusio...
Source: European Respiratory Journal - Category: Respiratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Epidemiology Source Type: research