Recent Insights into the Management of Behçet Syndrome

Abstract

Behçet syndrome (BS) is a multisystem vasculitis with variable vessel involvement that shows significant heterogeneity among patients in terms of clinical manifestations and disease course. Treatment choice and response are both influenced by this heterogeneity. BS treatments’ main goals are to quickly suppress inflammatory exacerbations and prevent relapses in order to protect organ functions and provide good quality of life. Besides the long-term experience with steroids and traditional immunosuppressives, biologic drugs, especially TNF inhibitors, have gained increasing importance in the treatment of BS over the years. In this review, we aimed to give an overview of the studies with conventional and biological drugs with proven efficacy in the treatment of BS, as well as promising drugs and current management strategies according to clinical phenotypes.

Keywords:

• Behçet syndrome
• treatment
• management
• biologic agents
• TNF inhibitor

Disclosure

Dr Yesim Ozguler reports Speaker fee from UCB, and Pfizer, outside the submitted work;

Prof. Dr. Gulen Hatemi reports research grant, lecture fees and fees for serving on an advisory board from Celgene, receiving consulting fees from UCB Pharma, Bayer, Johnson & Johnson, lecture fees from Novartis, Abbvie, Amgen, and UCB Pharma, grants from Silk Road Therapeutics outside the submitted work. The authors report no other conflicts of interest in this work.