Recurrence of angular cheilitis

Angular cheilitis-an oral disease with many facets

Cheilitis is a common inflammatory disorder of the vermillion and adjacent skin of the lips. A special type is angular cheilitis. The disease has a mixed etiology, mostly with bacterial and fungal components. Angular cheilitis may be a clinical sign of an underlying disease. It has two age peaks: one during childhood and another in adults. It becomes more frequent with aging. Clinical presentation, differential diagnoses, and treatment are discussed. Angular cheilitis is of importance in primary care of patients, in geriatrics, dentistry, pediatrics, internal medicine, and in dermatology.

Biomarker Identification, Safety, and Efficacy of High-Dose Antioxidants for Adrenomyeloneuropathy: a Phase II Pilot Study

X-Adrenoleukodystrophy (X-ALD) and its adult-onset, most prevalent variant adrenomyeloneuropathy (AMN) are caused by mutations in the peroxisomal transporter of the very long-chain fatty acid ABCD1. AMN patients classically present spastic paraparesis that can progress over decades, and a satisfactory treatment is currently lacking. Oxidative stress is an early culprit in X-ALD pathogenesis. A combination of antioxidants halts the clinical progression and axonal damage in a murine model of AMN, providing a strong rationale for clinical translation. In this phase II pilot, open-label study, 13 subjects with AMN were administered a high dose of α-tocopherol, N-acetylcysteine, and α-lipoic acid in combination. The primary outcome was the validation of a set of biomarkers for monitoring the biological effects of this and future treatments. Functional clinical scales, the 6-minute walk test (6MWT), electrophysiological studies, and cerebral MRI served as secondary outcomes. Most biomarkers of oxidative damage and inflammation were normalized upon treatment, indicating an interlinked redox and inflammatory homeostasis. Two of the inflammatory markers, MCP1 and 15-HETE, were predictive of the response to treatment. We also observed a significant decrease in central motor conduction time, together with an improvement or stabilization of the 6MWT in 8/10 subjects. This study provides a series of biomarkers that are useful to monitor redox and pro-inflammatory target engagement in future trials, together with candidate biomarkers that may serve for patient stratification and disease progression, which merit replication in future clinical trials. Moreover, the clinical results suggest a positive signal for extending these studies to phase III randomized, placebo-controlled, longer-term trials with the actual identified dose. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01495260.