What is it about?
Giant cell arteritis is the most common systemic vasculitis ( blood vessel inflammation) in patients over the age of 50 years and can cause irreversible blindness. Some temporal artery biopsy pathology studies suggested that patients with shingles might have higher risk of giant cell arteritis. The incidence of giant cell arteritis varies widely by country, and is most common in northern European countries and less common in Asian countries. If the association between zoster and giant cell arteritis is true, one would expect that countries with a higher incidence of zoster would have a higher incidence of giant cell arteritis as well.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
If shingles does predispose to giant cell arteritis, shingles vaccination may decrease the risk of giant cell arteritis, and antiviral treatment might be considered an adjunctive treatment for giant cell arteritis. The shingles vaccine and antivirals are expensive. Giant cell arteritis can cause irreversible blindness, and occasionally aortitis, myocardial infarction, stroke and even death.
Perspectives
We did not find an incremental relationship between the incidence of zoster and giant cell arteritis in 14 countries. This may mean that clinical varicella zoster infection in and of itself is not the most important risk factor for giant cell arteritis. This analysis between different countries is an ecologic analysis. Ecologic analysis may be prone to aggregation bias because results across countries may not necessarily hold true in individual patients.
Dr Edsel B Ing
University of Toronto
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Does herpes zoster predispose to giant cell arteritis: a geo-epidemiologic study, Clinical Ophthalmology, January 2018, Dove Medical Press,
DOI: 10.2147/opth.s151893.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
