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Allopurinol is still the main drug for treating hyperuricemia. About 2 percent of patients will develop a rash, and other treatment options may not be available, especially in the presence of renal dysfunction, leukemia, or lymphoma. These Canadian authors retrospectively evaluated their long experience with desensitization as a method of reintroducing allopurinol in patients who had developed a rash.
Thirty-two patients, mean age 63 years, developed rash while receiving allopurinol for hyperuricemia. Medication was reintroduced according to the following protocol: an initial dose of 50 microg per day, increasing every 3 days or so over a 28-day period to a low therapeutic dose of 100 mg daily. A lower dose and slower protocol was used in th…