Posted 11/10/2008 5:31 PM (GMT 0)
Jean,
I wanted to write, not to scare you, but to also give you something else to consider...so that you will be more informed. We were not and feel blindsided by the medical community from the pharmacy, to the doctors who treated my daughter. I would strongly recommend that you also consider getting MRI's of any major joint (knee, hip, shoulder etc) since you've been on high dose steroids. My daughter (19 at the time) took Pred and Iv solumedrol (highest dose 90 mg) while hospitalized for ulcerative colitis. A year later, she developed knee pain (and clicking/popping/grinding sound) and to make a really long story short, we found an orthopedic doctor who recommended aggressive MRI of all of her joints because she had been on steroids. She was diagnosed with osteonecrosis (aka avascular necrosis, "bone death") in her rt shoulder, both elbows, both wrists, both knees, and both ankles. It was/is devastating to all of us and feel outrage that the product monograph, nor the doctors, disclose this risk yet it's been known for 30 years that this drug causes this disease. They talk about Osteoporosis, bone pain, etc etc, but none warned us of this risk. I've been doing research for the past year on this and will tell you that 7,000 people a year get this disease from the use of Prednisone. The key thing though, and the reason I'm talking about this, is that if you find it early by MRI (will not show up on x-ray early on in the course of the disease process), the better a person's chance of getting early surgical treatment to halt the progression of the disease or prevent the collapse of the bone.