News article on Dupuytren's

Today I thought I would have a look out there and see if there was any news around about Ledderhose disease and of course a quick search in Google News revealed that there was nothing so I tried a search for Dupuytren's instead knowing that this is more common and seems to hit the news more often. Sure enough there were some hits (though still not that many) but looking through them one caught my eye so I thought I would do a post on it.

The article in question is called "The solution is close at hand" and was written by Adam Greenberg of the Clifton Journal and can be found here.

This report looks at a patient being treated with Xiaflex and how it is used to treat patients with Dupytren's and how this is the 3rd success story from this particular Doctor. The report states that this patient is on their third treatment and that it seems to be working very well. In fact if you read this you will see that the doctor even goes so far as to say that patients may start to see results within "days" and that Surgery takes longer to work than this and has a poor long term outcome.

The patient, an 80 year old man said that he is the only person in his family that has the condition and had given up on something being done in his lifetime (well words like that anyway). He found that just days after the first treatment he had increased movement in his fingers.

Overall this is a very positive article and it is going to be interesting to see if this drug or indeed a similar one can take off and be cheap enough for blanket approval on the NHS here in the UK. After all you would think that treatment with something like this is much cheaper than having someone in for surgery and if the results do turn out to be as good then surely it has to be considered. It is good to see Dupuytren's in the news although it would be nice for a change to see if we can get Ledderhose in the spotlight, anybody have any ideas?