Dear Gastroenterologist:

Patients with Fabry Disease are often referred to gastroenterologists as adolescents or young adults with gastrointestinal distress including postprandial pain, abdominal cramping and diarrhea. Some patients are reported to have up to 25 bowel movements a day. Blood vessels and cells of the GI tract may show deposition of a glycolipid, globotriaosylceramide, that cannot be degraded due to an enzymatic defect in the lysosomal enzyme alpha–galactosidase A, the cause of Fabry disease. This disease follows an X-linked inheritance, so your male patients are homozygotes, while symptoms in female heterozygotes are usually mild. In the early stages, your patients’ other complaints may be episodes of paresthesia, hypohidrosis, heat and cold intolerance, and angiokeratoma. Their ophthalmologist may have noticed corneal and lenticular opacities that do not affect vision.

The progressive accumulation of glycolipids, mainly in the walls of blood vessels, causes multiple organ impairment and dysfunction and most patients succumb in their forties or fifties to renal failure, cardiovascular and/or cerebrovascular disease. A goal of research into Fabry disease has been to provide the missing alpha-galactosidase enzyme for degradation of these glycolipids to patients diagnosed early in life.

Enzyme replacement therapy is now available to prevent the progression to heart and kidney damage, stroke and untimely death, and provide relief for early symptoms. The FDA has approved the therapy for treatment of patients. Your patients are eligible for TESTING. If their diagnosis is confirmed by a simple test of alpha-galactosidase activity in their blood sample, they can be evaluated for treatment.

We would like to solicit your help in identifying patients with Fabry disease. Please check your charts for patients displaying the above-mentioned symptoms, and then send them a letter informing them of the availability of testing. Enclosed please find a draft of that type of letter providing the relevant information on how to obtain a testing kit that maybe used in any physician’s office. You may copy this letter onto your letterhead and modify it in any way you feel is appropriate. It will be the patient’s decision to follow up on this letter, but we would appreciate your encouragement. Enzyme replacement therapy for a similar disease, Gaucher’s disease, is one of the most successful applications of modern science and has helped many patients to lead normal lives without the pain and complications of that disease. We hope to provide similar relief to patients with Fabry disease by replacing the missing alpha-galactosidase enzyme. Their lives may depend on it.

We thank you for your efforts and cooperation, and we are certain your patients will, too.

Dear Gastroenterologist Patient Draft