Clinical characteristics of angioedema with eosinophilia.

Angioedema with eosinophilia (AE) is a very rare allergy disease, case reports of which have been published sporadically since 1984. Here, we retrospectively analyzed the clinical features of 10 AE patients in Korea. Nine of the 10 subjects were young females, ranging from 23 to 38 years old. Twenty percent of the subjects had episodic-type AE with high serum IgM and eosinophil counts, while 80% were non-episodic type with normal serum IgM levels but high eosinophil counts. All patients had used systemic corticosteroids to control AE. One patient with refractory episodic-type AE was treated with anti-IgE antibody. This is the first study to evaluate the clinical characteristics of AE in a Korean population.