This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on ISI (1)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Cardiovascular Disease/ Myocardial Infarction  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

We congratulate Imazio et al¹ for their excellent article on colchicine treatment for recurrent pericarditis. We also strongly agree that colchicine is useful for this condition,² even in difficult patients.³ We have also used the half dose of 0.5 mg, in some conditions, to improve compliance.

On the other hand, in clinical practice many physicians do not believe colchicine works, perhaps because they still see recurrences after starting treatment with this drug. In our opinion, there are several explanations for this. First, colchicine is clearly useful for acute pericarditis but not for other types of pericardial diseases that are often erroneously labeled as "pericarditis"; for instance, it is not useful for painless chronic pericardial effusions with a normal C-reactive protein level. Second, some physicians discontinue treatment with corticosteroids and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and add de novo colchicine, but treatment with only colchicine will probably lead to another failure. Finally, in . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION
Antonio Brucato, MD; Giovanni Brambilla, MD; Yehuda Adler, MD; David H. Spodick, MD

RELATED ARTICLE

Colchicine as First-Choice Therapy for Recurrent Pericarditis: Results of the CORE (COlchicine for REcurrent pericarditis) Trial
Massimo Imazio, Marco Bobbio, Enrico Cecchi, Daniela Demarie, Franco Pomari, Mauro Moratti, Aldo Ghisio, Riccardo Belli, and Rita Trinchero
Arch Intern Med. 2005;165(17):1987-1991.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT