Whipple’s Disease: A Well-Done Outcome to a Rare Disease

Excerpt

Whipple’s disease (WD) is a condition of which all gastroenterologists likely learn about in medical school, occasionally investigate for, and very rarely see. Despite this rarity, or maybe because of it, there has been a longstanding fascination with the disease. In 1907, Dr. George Hoyt Whipple described a case of arthritis, weight loss, and diarrhea, which when examined postmortem was remarkable for prominent periodic acid-Schiff (PAS)-staining foamy macrophages in the small intestinal lamina propria. He hypothesized that there was an underlying disorder of fat metabolism and termed, what would eventually be known as Whipple’s disease, intestinal lipodystrophy. The first small bowel biopsy diagnosis of Whipple’s was made in 1958; since then, the causative organism has been identified and cultured, its genome sequenced, and new polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based bacterial identification and immunohistochemical diagnostic tests developed. …