What is Purpura?

                Purpura is a skin condition causing skin blotching; this is when bleeding under the skin causes purple like marks or blotches to appear on the skin. It does not whitening when pressure is applied to it. Purpura is Latin for purple which describes the color of the skin when you have the condition.

An investigation carried out by the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, have done some experiments on animals to demonstrate that Vitamin E would inhibit purpura. Purpura is an affection that is caused by hemorrhage into the skin. This is then brought about by an increase in the fragility of the blood capillaries of the skin. Purpura is an affection also found to occur often times in people as well as animals, and the above investigators state that clinical treatments in a clinical trial patient demonstrated that with Vitamin E as a treatment method that was continued for long periods of time the symptoms will become less severe and eventually disappear.

There are several variations one of which is called Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura this is the condition of a patient having an abnormally low platelet count (thrombocytopenia) this is of an unknown cause which is why it is called idiopathic.  Most of ITP is related to the production of antibodies against platelets.  Most instances ITP is has no symptoms however when it is very low it can lead to visible symptoms, such the above purpura (and worst case, bleeding diathesis.

A German physician Paul Gottlieb Werlhof was the first to describe it in 1735, and was originally named as Werlhof’s disease.  In the 20th century, the term idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura was chosen because it was a better description of the condition. It was first report and successfully treated in 1916, when a Polish medical student, Paul Kaznelson, described a female patient's response to a splenectomy(surgical removal of the spleen).  Splenectomy was the first choice of treatment until the introduction of steroid therapy in the 1950s as an alternative. Refractory ITP is a term used in most chronic cases where thrombocytopenia persists despite the use of all clinically indicated therapies.