Review Article Clinical Features of Inflammatory Myopathies and Their Association with Malignancy: A Systematic Review in Asian Population

Copyright © 2013 Patompong Ungprasert et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Introduction. Idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIMs) are a group of chronic systemic autoimmune diseases that mainly affect the skeletal muscle. The common subtypes include adult dermatomyositis (DM), polymyositis (PM), and inclusion body myositis (IBM). Most of the earlier studies that described the clinical characteristics of IIM as well as their association with cancer were conducted in Western population. Our study is the first systematic review that summarizes the clinical data of DM/PM in Asian population.Methods. We identified 14 case series of DM/PM that met our eligibility criteria. We then compared this data with tha