The presence of symptom clusters, regional differences in disease expression and similarities with, for example, Crohn's disease suggest multiple pathological pathways are involved in Behcet syndrome. These features also make formulating disease criteria difficult. Genetic studies have identified HLA-B*51 to be the important genetic risk factor. However, the low prevalence of HLA-B*51 in many patients with bone fide disease, especially in non-endemic regions, suggests other factors must also be operative in Behcet syndrome. This consideration is also true for the newly proposed 'MHC-I-opathy' concept. Despite lacking a clear aetiological mechanism and definition, management of manifestations that include major vascular disease (such as Budd-Chiari syndrome and pulmonary artery involvement), eye disease and central nervous system involvement has improved with the help of new technology. Furthermore, even with our incomplete understanding of disease mechanisms, the prognoses of patients with Behcet syndrome, including those with eye disease, continue to improve.

Behçet syndrome: a contemporary view.

Neuro-Behcet’s disease (NBD) is one of the more serious manifestations of Behcet’s disease (BD), which is a relapsing inflammatory multisystem disease with an interesting epidemiology. Though NBD is relatively uncommon, being potentially treatable, neurologists need to consider it in the differential diagnosis of inflammatory, infective, or demyelinating CNS disorders. Evidence-based information on key issues of NBD diagnosis and management is scarce, and planning for such studies is challenging. We therefore initiated this project to develop expert consensus recommendations that might be helpful to neurologists and other clinicians, created through an extensive literature review and wide consultations with an international advisory panel, followed by a Delphi exercise. We agreed on consensus criteria for the diagnosis of NBD with two levels of certainty in addition to recommendations on when to consider NBD in a neurological patient, and on the use of various paraclinical tests. The management recommendations included treatment of the parenchymal NBD and cerebral venous thrombosis, the use of disease modifying therapies, prognostic factors, outcome measures, and headache in BD. Future studies are needed to validate the proposed criteria and provide evidence-based treatments.

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Diagnosis and management of Neuro-Behcet's disease: international consensus recommendations.

Behcet's disease (BD) is a chronic, relapsing, inflammatory multisystem disease of unknown etiology. Oral ulcers, genital ulcers, cutaneous lesions, and ocular and articular involvement are the most frequent features of the disease. Mucocutaneous lesions are considered hallmarks of the disease, and often precede other manifestations. Therefore, their recognition may permit earlier diagnosis and treatment with beneficial results for prognosis. BD is particularly prevalent in "Silk Route" populations but has a global distribution. The disease usually starts around the third or fourth decade of life. Sex distribution is roughly equal. The diagnosis is based on clinical criteria, as there is no pathognomonic test. Genetic factors have been investigated extensively, and association with human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-B51 is still known as the strongest genetic susceptibility factor. The T-helper 17 and interleukin (IL)-17 pathways are active, and play an important role, particularly in acute attacks of BD. Neutrophil activity is increased in BD, and the affected organs show a significant neutrophil and lymphocyte infiltration. HLA-B51 association and increased IL-17 response are thought to play a role in neutrophil activation. Treatment is mainly based on the suppression of inflammatory attacks of the disease using immunomodulatory and immunosuppressive agents. Although treatment has become much more effective in recent years with the introduction of newer drugs, BD is still associated with considerable morbidity and increased mortality. Male sex, younger age of onset and increased number of organs involved at the diagnosis are associated with a more severe disease and, therefore, require more aggressive treatment.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1346-8138.13381

Behçet's disease: A comprehensive review with a focus on epidemiology, etiology and clinical features, and management of mucocutaneous lesions

Behcet's Disease (BD) is classified among vasculitides. The aim of this review was to put together different known reports in order to help the reader to better understand the disease, to avoid the frequent misdiagnosis, and to decide the best treatment. Areas covered: a) Epidemiology: BD is rare, and is seen along the Silk Road, from 20 to 420/100,000 in Turkey and 80/100,000 in Iran, to 0.64/100,000 in the UK. b) Clinical manifestations: oral aphthosis is seen in more than 95% of patients, genital aphthosis (60-90%), skin (pseudofolliculitis/erythema nodosum, 40-90%), eyes (uveitis/retinal vasculitis, 45-90%), gastrointestinal (diarrhea/hemorrhage/perforation/pain, 4-38%), vascular (venous/arterial thrombosis, aneurysm, 2.2-50%), neurological (all kinds, especially meningo-encephalitis, 2.3-38.5%), and articular (arthralgia/arthritis/ankylosing spondylitis, 11.6-93%). c) Pathergy test is positive in some patients: 8.6% (in India) to 70.7% (in China). This data was extracted from the five nationwide surveys and the largest case series from BD conference reports and a Pubmed search. Expert commentary: Diagnosis is clinical but classification/diagnosis criteria may help. The best criteria for BD is the International Criteria for Behcet's Disease (ICBD). BD is a multisystem disease progressing by attacks and remissions. Each attack may resemble the preceding or it may be different in duration, severity, and the systems involved.

Behcet's disease: epidemiology, clinical manifestations, and diagnosis.

Behçet's syndrome patients exhibit specific microbiome signature

Objective
Behcet's disease (BD) is a chronic, relapsing, inflammatory vascular disease with no pathognomonic test. Low sensitivity of the currently applied International Study Group (ISG) clinical diagnostic criteria led to their reassessment.

Methods
An International Team for the Revision of the International Criteria for BD (from 27 countries) submitted data from 2556 clinically diagnosed BD patients and 1163 controls with BD-mimicking diseases or presenting at least one major BD sign. These were randomly divided into training and validation sets. Logistic regression, ‘leave-one-country-out’ cross-validation and clinical judgement were employed to develop new International Criteria for BD (ICBD) with the training data. Existing and new criteria were tested for their performance in the validation set.

Results
For the ICBD, ocular lesions, oral aphthosis and genital aphthosis are each assigned 2 points, while skin lesions, central nervous system involvement and vascular manifestations 1 point each. The pathergy test, when used, was assigned 1 point. A patient scoring ≥4 points is classified as having BD. In the training set, 93.9% sensitivity and 92.1% specificity were assessed compared with 81.2% sensitivity and 95.9% specificity for the ISG criteria. In the validation set, ICBD demonstrated an unbiased estimate of sensitivity of 94.8% (95% CI: 93.4–95.9%), considerably higher than that of the ISG criteria (85.0%). Specificity (90.5%, 95% CI: 87.9–92.8%) was lower than that of the ISG-criteria (96.0%), yet still reasonably high. For countries with at least 90%-of-cases and controls having a pathergy test, adding 1 point for pathergy test increased the estimate of sensitivity from 95.5% to 98.5%, while barely reducing specificity from 92.1% to 91.6%.

Conclusion
The new proposed criteria derived from multinational data exhibits much improved sensitivity over the ISG criteria while maintaining reasonable specificity. It is proposed that the ICBD criteria to be adopted both as a guide for diagnosis and classification of BD.

The International Criteria for Behçet's Disease (ICBD): A collaborative study of 27 countries on the sensitivity and specificity of the new criteria

Aims: Behcet's disease (BD) was originally a disease of the Silk Road Some authors think that BD from the Silk Road is different from those seen in other countries The aim of this study was to analyze the clinical manifestations of BD in APLAR countries, where some of them are in the Silk Road (SR) and some others not (NSR)



Methods:  Data from Australia (NSR), Hong Kong (NSR), India (SR), Iran (SR), and Singapore (SR) were selected and analyzed under the same protocol Prior published data from China (SR) Japan (SR) and Korea (SR) were included in the analysis



Results:  The mean age at the onset of the disease was under 30 for all countries except Japan and Singapore The male gender was more frequent except in Australia and Korea Oral aphthosis was the most frequent manifestation (90–100%) Genital aphthosis was less frequent (57–82%) Skin manifestations were also frequent (61–87%) Ocular manifestations were reported from 21–69% of patients The difference was mainly due to patients’ selection bias and the low number of patients in some reports The same was true for joint (30–87%), gastrointestinal (6–38%), neurological (25–29%) and vascular manifestations (5–28%)



Conclusion:  Despite the percentage difference among some countries, the general pattern of the disease was the same, suggesting that the minor differences seen in different parts of the world were not enough to call the disease a syndrome, or to differentiate Behcet's disease of the Silk Road from those seen in Western countries

Comparative analysis of Behcet's disease in the APLAR region

Aims: To review the Indian experience with anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α therapy.



Methods:  ‘PubMed’ and ‘IndMED’ were searched for Indian studies on anti-TNF-α therapy. Data were compiled and analysed.



Results:  Data on infliximab from 176 patients from five different series were collated. One hundred and forty-seven had ankylosing spondylitis (AS), nine had polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), 12 had rheumatoid arthritis (RA), six had undifferentiated spondyloarthropathy, one had inflammatory bowel disease-related spondyloarthritis and one had psoriatic arthritis. Thus, 155/176. (88%) had spondyloarthropathy (SpA). No screening for latent tuberculosis was done in any of the studies. One series comprising 108 cases of AS, used 3 mg/kg infliximab infusions (instead of 5 mg/kg) at 8-weekly intervals with omission of the 2-week and 6-week doses. All others with SpA (n = 47) followed the standard protocol: 171/176 patients had a significant improvement. Reactivation tuberculosis developed in 5/47 (10.6%) SpA patients treated with standard doses of infliximab. This amounted to 56 times increased risk compared to baseline (0.187%). None of the 129 patients treated with 3 mg/kg infusions of infliximab developed reactivation tuberculosis (AS −108, RA −12, JIA −9). The lone study on etanercept showed good efficacy in 40 patients with RA. However, seven serious adverse events occurred.



Conclusions:  Infliximab showed expected efficacy in SpA, RA and JIA. Reactivation tuberculosis developed in 10.6% of the SpA group treated with standard regimen. Patients treated with lower doses of infliximab which included a large subgroup of SpA patients and those with RA or JIA did not develop tuberculosis.

Ashok Kumar

Papers

The International Criteria for Behçet's Disease (ICBD): A collaborative study of 27 countries on the sensitivity and specificity of the new criteria

Comparative analysis of Behcet's disease in the APLAR region

Experience with anti‐tumor necrosis factor‐α therapy in India