Discordance Rates in Healing-Healed Arteritis in Temporal Artery Biopsies

Temporal artery biopsy (TAB) is the gold standard diagnostic modality for giant cell arteritis (GCA). Since bilateral positivity for active GCA is 90+%, unilateral TAB is considered standard of care for diagnosing GCA. (1,2) However, GCA can present with active, healing/healed and no injury in a segmental uneven distribution along the extracranial carotid artery tree. Healing/healed arterial injuries are important to identify since they are usually treated as active GCA. We studied the discordance rate for healing/healed arterial injury in bilateral TAB to verify whether unilateral biopsies would render as high diagnostic yield as they do in active GCA.