Therapeutic Plasma Exchange: An Oil Change for Your Body?
Recently, in a scleroderma focused Facebook patient support group, a newly diagnosed patient posted this comment after her initial doctor visit: "…he told me that all they can do is chemotherapy when it starts taking over my body??? Really, is that it? Nothing they can do?" Among many other supportive and helpful comments from other patients, one patient mentioned therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) and described it as follows: "They basically take out the plasma every [...]
Insurance Coverage for Therapeutic Plasma Exchange in the U.S.
Therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE/therapeutic apheresis) is a process in which most of the plasma (the liquid part of blood) is replaced by a substitute fluid such as sterilized albumin in an outpatient procedure that typically takes 1.5 to 2 hours. The goal of TPE is to remove large amounts of potential disease causing proteins, for example autoantibodies, that mistakenly attack our own bodies. TPE is a widely used procedure for a variety of neurological diseases [...]
False Positive Scl-70 Results – A Major Problem in Laboratory Testing
Scl-70 antibody testing can be done by a number of different methods. Historically, Scl-70 antibody testing was mostly done by a technique called double immunodiffusion (ID), which is considered to be the most reliable Scl-70 antibody testing method [1]. ID testing is time-consuming and expensive. Because of the difficulty and cost of doing Scl-70 antibody testing using ID, almost all labs have switched to ELISA or Multiplex testing. While Scl-70 antibodies are considered to be [...]
Therapeutic Plasma Exchange (TPE) – Additional Questions and Answers
Recently, we have been getting an increasing number of inquiries about the use of Therapeutic Plasma Exchange (TPE) as a potential treatment for systemic sclerosis (SSc). If any of you are unsure what we are talking about, start by watching this video: https://youtu.be/iWT0oW8FRdE. It is targeted at clinicians but is pretty easy to understand. A number of new questions have come up recently, so we thought this post might be useful in answering them. Who [...]