One week oral therapy with terbinafine in tinea corporis/cruris

ABSTRACT

Terbinafine has been used in different regimens. To evaluate short therapy for a week, 28 patients [24 male and 4 female] were randomly selected from Dermatology Out Patients, with myocologically proven cases of tinea corporis/cruris and given 250 mg terbinafine daily for seven days. They were followed up for clinical and myocological examination; every 2 weeks for over a period of 4 weeks and some seen for 8 weeks .Clinical assessment was done by the parameters of vesiculation, erythema, scaling and pruritis on 0-3 scale. Mean sum of scores of 8.4 on week 0 decreased to 1.80 on weeks 2 and 0.53 on week 4 showing highly signigicant improvement [p< 0.005]. Total clearance was seen in 70% of patients whereas 25% patients needed a second course of therapy and 5% were treated for a relapse. Thus one week's oral terbinafine is sufficient in vast majority of patients but a close follow up, over a period of 4 weeks is necessary for total clearance of the disease and for elimination of relapse