Clinical Characteristics of Angioedema With Eosinophilia

Abstract

Diagnosis was based on peripheral angioedema on distal extremities that developed concurrently with peripheral eosinophilia (1,000/L) and improved while eosinophil count decreased. Eosinophilia due to preexisting underlying diseases, such as tumor, parasite infection, and current uncontrolled allergic disease, was excluded. The age, sex, preexisting underlying disease, development of fever, body weight gain, and internal organ involvement data were collected from medical records. The duration of symptoms and eosinophilia, corticosteroid dose, Angioedema with eosinophilia (AE) is a very rare allergy disease, case reports of which have been published sporadically since 1984. Here, we retrospectively analyzed the clinical features of 10 AE patients in Korea. Nine of the 10 subjects were young females, ranging from 23 to 38 years old. Twenty percent of the subjects had episodic-type AE with high serum IgM and eosinophil counts, while 80% were non-episodic type with normal serum IgM levels but high eosinophil counts. All patients had used systemic corticosteroids to control AE. One patient with refractory episodic-type AE was treated with anti-IgE antibody. This is the first study to evaluate the clinical characteristics of AE in a Korean population.