Sami Khella, MD, discusses how targeted therapies can rapidly improve outcomes for patients with more difficult-to-control myasthenia gravis, while noting infection risks and the need for careful monitoring.
Transcript
So these new targeted therapies have been a wonder for improving patients’ lives. They work very quickly, within days even, to maybe even a couple of weeks. They are great in that their side effects are really quite limited. They do have some nuances to them, each of them.
Certainly, the complement inhibitors are a little bit more problematic to use because of the need for vaccinations against Neisseria meningitis, and that becomes a fairly cumbersome set of problems on its own. You have to follow and make sure that the patients are vaccinated up to date. But these drugs have really been very, very good in helping patients with severe disease.
Now, I have to tell you, you know, most myasthenics have relatively mild disease. You can control their disease with a little bit of prednisone, a little bit of acetylcholine receptor inhibitor, such as pyridostigmine.
The patients that I tend to see tend to be a little bit more problematic, because we’re seeing them as a second opinion, or patients who are not well controlled or not happy with their current control.
