The impact of temporal artery biopsy for the diagnosis of giant cell arteritis in clinical practice in a tertiary university hospital

 Kaltsonoudis E, Pelechas E, PapoudouBai A, Markatseli TE, Elisaf M, Voulgari PV, et al. (2019) The impact of temporal artery biopsy for the diagnosis of giant cell arteritis in clinical practice in a tertiary university hospital. PLoS ONE 14(3): e0210845. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. Pone.0210845

I chose to present this article in conjunction with my patient case of a 63-year old female who underwent a temporal artery biopsy to rule out temporal arteritis. The objective of this study was to assess the diagnostic impact of temporal artery biopsy histology on inpatients with suspected temporal arteritis. This was a prospective study, a total of 245 temporal artery biopsies were included in this study. The reasons for admission were fever of unknown origin, symptoms of polymyalgia rheumatica, a new headache, anemia of chronic disease, and eye disturbances. Positive results were found in 49 (20%) of the biopsies. The most important was that 5 out of 6 patients with eye symptoms had positive biopsies. They concluded that biopsies are helpful in making a diagnosis of temporal arteritis but are not sensitive and that a positive biopsy is correlated with eye related symptoms.

There are limitations to this study, it is small sample sized. They did not discuss the outcomes of the 51% of the patients who had negative biopsies. The results of this study are not statistically significant.

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