Clinical features of patients with Behçet's disease and epididymitis.

Purpose: Epididymitis is a rare manifestation of Behçet's disease but its clinical significance is still not fully understood. We evaluated the clinical significance of epididymitis in patients with Behçet's disease.

Materials And Methods: Of 780 male patients attending our clinics between 1985 and 2002 who were diagnosed with Behçet's disease by international criteria or who had the complete or incomplete type of Behçet's disease by Japanese criteria 36 were identified with epididymitis. Clinical data on these patients were reviewed.

Results: The 36 patients were categorized into the complete (13 or 36.1%) and incomplete (23 or 63.9%) types of Behçet's disease with an average age at onset of 27.4 years. The frequency of individual symptoms were oral ulcers and cutaneous involvement in all 36 cases (100%), genital ulcers in 32 (88.9%), arthritis in 18 (50.0%), ocular involvement in 17 (47.2%), central nervous system involvement in 2 (5.6%), gastrointestinal ulcer in 1 (2.8%) and a positive pathergy test in 4 (11.1%). A significantly higher number of patients with epididymitis had genital ulcers (p <0.05), cutaneous involvement (p <0.001), arthritis (p <0.05), central nervous system involvement (p <0.05) and a positive pathergy test (p <0.05) compared with the other 744 with Behçet's disease without epididymitis who served as controls.

Conclusions: To our knowledge there has been no controlled study of the clinical significance of epididymitis in Behçet's disease. Our results suggest a tendency toward severe Behçet's disease manifestations in patients with epididymitis, prompting physicians to evaluate closely and meticulously treat such patients.