Indications for intravenous gammaglobulin therapy in inflammatory myopathies.

Polymyositis (PM) and dermatomyositis (DM) are inflammatory muscular diseases of unknown cause. An immune mechanism may cause these inflammatory myopathies.'2 The mainstay of therapy in inflammatory myopathies is corticosteroids.3 In patients who are resistant to corticosteroids, many therapies are available: immunosuppressive drugs, plasmapheresis, or total body irradiation.4 These therapies are not always effective and may be responsible for certain serious side effects. Immunomodulatory therapy with intravenous immunoglobulins (IVIg) has been shown to be useful in a number of diseases featuring disordered immunoregulation.5 Consequently, we first administered IVIg to patients with chronic refractory inflammatory myopathies in an uncontrolled trial6 7 with favourable results. We describe our experience of IVIg in PM/DM.