Professional paper
Sweet’s syndrome – report of a patient with a variety of extraintestinal manifestations of ulcerative colitis
Mirjana Balen Topić
; Klinika za infektivne bolesti "Dr.Fran Mihaljević", Zagreb, Hrvatska
Marta Perović Mihanović
; Klinika za infektivne bolesti "Dr. Fran Mihaljević", Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
Sweet’s syndrome is a rare dermatological disorder characterized by eruption of painful reddish plaques on the skin, accompanied by fever, neutrophilia in peripheral blood and finding of perivascular neutrophilic infiltrates in the skin biopsy sample. The syndrome is in 50% of cases associated with other diseases and conditions such as malignancies, bacterial and viral infections, autoimmune and connective tissue diseases, inflammatory bowel diseases, use of certain drugs, etc. Ulcerative colitis is idiopathic, immunologically mediated inflammatory bowel disease which is in a small proportion of patients associated with extraintestinal manifestations of disease, characteristically developed on the joints, skin and mucous membranes. We present a case of a 39-year-old woman with ulcerative colitis in whom the six month period of colitis symptoms was followed by the development of Sweet’s syndrome, reactive polyarthritis and polyserositis. Using the combined anti-inflammatory treatment with methylprednisolone and mesalazine in therapeutical doses the remission of ulcerative colitis and regression of all extraintestinal manifestations was achieved, but three months later a relapse of reactive polyarthritis developed that was successfully treated with ibuprofen. When Sweet’s syndrome is suspected, the histological examination of the skin lesions should be performed, and if a characteristic histological finding is accompanied by other clinical and laboratory criteria and the diagnosis of Sweet’s syndrome is established, the search for underlying diseases should be done. The systemic treatment with corticosteroids, recommended as the golden standard, proved effective in the treatment of our patient.
Keywords
Sweet’s syndrome; ulcerative colitis; reactive arthritis; polyserositis
Hrčak ID:
72559
URI
Publication date:
30.6.2011.
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