The clinical name "granulomatosis with polyangiitis (Wegener’s)" should replace "Wegener’s granulomatosis", according to a recommendation issued jointly by the American College of Rheumatology, the European League Against Rheumatism, and the American Society of Nephrology.
The new name may be expressed as its acronym, GPA, suggested Dr. Ronald J. Falk, the Doc J. Thurston Distinguished Professor of Medicine and chief of the division of nephrology and hypertension at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his associates. The parenthetical would be dropped once enough time had passed that the old name was not longer used in the literature, according to the article published in the April issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism (doi:10.1002/art.30286).
The motivation behind the suggested change is a well-documented drive to move away from eponymous disease names in general and from those named after Nazis and other war criminals in particular.
The push to remove Wegener’s eponym began with the 2006 publication of an article by Dr. Alexander Woywodt of the University of Hanover, Germany (Lancet 2006;367:1296-7), and his colleagues, detailing what they had uncovered about Frederich Wegener’s activities during and after World War II.
Wegener, who died in 1990, was never tried for war crimes. However, Wegener had joined the Nazi paramilitary "Sturmabteilung," or brownshirts, in 1932, Dr. Woywodt and his colleagues learned, and retained his Nazi affiliations until the end of World War II. In 1938, Wegener became a lieutenant colonel in the medical corps and, in 1939, arrived in Lodz to serve as a military pathologist. Dr. Wegener later worked for the health office of the local civil municipal authority in Lodz, where his mentor was an ardent supporter of racial hygiene theory, according to Dr. Woywodt.
Dr. Woywodt and his colleagues had recommended that, in light of this finding, "Wegener’s granulomatosis" be changed to "ANCA-associated granulomatous vasculitis." The attempt at a name change has not caught on.
Wegener was not the only Nazi physician with an eponymous rheumatic disease: In 2003, journal editors agreed to stop using the term Reiter’s syndrome, which had been named after Hans Reiter, who was president of Nazi Germany’s Reich health ministry before and during World War II and oversaw human experiments at the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Over the past several years the discussion of tainted eponyms has been accompanied by a public debate over whether to abolish eponyms in disease altogether (BMJ 2007;335:424).
In an editorial accompanying Dr. Falk and his colleagues’ article, Dr. Eric L. Matteson, chair division of rheumatology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and Dr. Richard S. Panush, chair of medicine at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., take the abolitionist position, writing that rheumatologists "should lead the way in eliminating the use of eponymous titles for diseases. "They can reflect historical inaccuracies, jingoism, and political influence, and accord legitimacy to tainted and unethical research."
Other researchers with an interest in Nazi eponyms, including Dr. Rael Strous of Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University, have not shared this view entirely. In a 2007 article cataloging diseases named in honor of Nazis and their victims (IMAJ 2007;9:207-14), Dr. Strous argued that the aggressors’ eponyms should be abolished. However, he noted, many diseases have also been named for physicians who became the Nazis’ victims.
The victims’ eponyms "should be strengthened and perpetuated," Dr. Strous wrote. "The maintenance of these eponyms would serve as a historical epithet for those who suffered."