Treating myositis

Exercise and physiotherapy

You must be very careful about exercising if you have severe symptoms of myositis, such as severe muscle pain and weakness. Most specialists don't recommend exercising during this period.

However, it's very important to maintain gentle muscle and joint movement, particularly in cases where myositis develops during childhood. This ensures that the joints which are moved by muscles don't become stiff and take on a fixed position.

As the condition is brought under control, a gentle exercise programme can be started and gradually increased following the advice of a physiotherapist.

Steroid medication

Steroids arethe main type of medication used to treat polymyositis and dermatomyositis. They can include:

• steroid creams which can be used to treat the affected areas ofskin in dermatomyositis
• higher doses of steroid tablets if there's severe muscle weakness

High doses of steroidscan cause side effectssuch as weight gain, high blood pressure , diabetes , cataracts (cloudy patchesin the lens of the eye) and osteoporosis (weakened bones).

Thistemporarily changes the way your immune system operates.

Intravenous immunoglobulin therapy can produce a rapid improvement in the symptoms of myositis, but it's very expensive and the benefits usually only last a few weeks.

Therefore, itisn't suitable as a long-term treatment, and is usually only used to treat people who are seriously ill while they're waiting for other treatments to work.

Biologic therapies

It's thought that biologic therapies, which are widely used to treat conditionssuch as rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis , may also play a part in managing myositis in people whose symptoms don't respond to conventional steroids and immunosuppressive medication.

For example, rituximab is a biological medicine which helps reduce inflammation that's recently been approved for treating myositis. It's given by intravenous infusion (directly into a vein through an intravenous line, needle or catheter) on two occasions two weeks apart and may be repeated months or years later.