If you’re living with Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF), you know the headaches (literal and figurative) that come along with it.
One of those headaches is finding treatment. Especially a treatment that works.
Once you finally:
- nail down a diagnosis,
- find a doctor who actually knows what your disease is, and
- (even more miraculously) find a doctor who knows how treat it…
That’s when the true journey begins.
Many people enter the medication carousel, trying this and that and the other thing, in various combinations to see what, if anything, helps.
If you’ve been diagnosed with FMF, chances are you’ve heard of a little drug named colchicine. Originally used for gout, colchicine has shown to be an effective treatment for FMF as well.
While an effective first-line treatment, not everyone can tolerate colchicine or finds it effective against their FMF. It’s important to remember that not every drug will work for everyone. Our body’s are unique and have their own reactions to things.
Personally, my body can be a stubborn, willful bitch sometimes.
So, for people with FMF who don’t have success with cochicine, what is there next option?
Well, according to this research, which compiled information from over 25 reports, the anti-IL-1 treatment is actually effective. Some specific anti-IL-1 treatments studied were anakinra and canakinumab.
So have hope! When you get to the point in your journey where you finally get to try treatment, many people want it to be a quite fix. Once you have a diagnosis, figuring out what to do next should be easy, right?
Unfortunately, it’s often not. Chronic illnesses can change over time and come and go as they please. So fighting them takes patience, resilience, and CONSTANT VIGILANCE!
But with even more research coming out focusing on rare diseases, hold on to your hope. There are always new things on the horizon.
