What is the difference......

.......between adults with chronic ITP and children with chronic ITP? Just curious. I keep on reading that ITP in adults and children is different, but the only difference I've found is that children are more likely to have acute ITP than adults. If a kid has chronic ITP, what is the difference between that kid and an adult with chronic ITP?

If anyone can tell me the answer, my curiousity would be very grateful!

Thanks, Ali

Ali:

The main difference is that adults are usually treated more often than kids, where doctors tend to use the watch and wait method more often. There are a lot of adults who choose not to treat though.

I just know that I'm not as comfortable giving advice for a child as I would be for an adult. It's much easier to suggest some of the treatments for an adult than it is for a child who may have nasty or possible permanent side effects.

Other than that, there isn't much of a difference.

So the only difference is that the approach and the treatment vary because of the activities of the children and their ability to withstand some of the side effects of treatment?

I think that children get ITP through a different mechanism than adults. In children the immune system is developing and I think that things can go wrong in a different way as the immune system develops. It also seems like their system can reset itself as it develops and that's why they go into remission more often. If you poke around on the net and read some reviews you can find discussions of this. although they're very hard to read if you don't know a lot about immunology. I have a background in the Life Sciences, but don't know that much about Immunology, which is a huge and complex field, so I can follow some of it, but much of it is over my head.

The medicines for ITP are really non-specific apart from perhaps nplate and promacta. Most of them just suppress the immune system in general, so they're not really getting at the root of the issue and work in both children and adults. Even nplate and promacta aren't really getting at the cause of platelet destruction; they're just stimulating the body to make enough to overcome the destruction.

Lily

Alison - basically, yes. Other than that, no one really knows the reason behind adult chronic ITP and child chronic ITP. It's not that the treatments are any different, just that the order and length of usage vary.