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An animated, cited guide for students and patients. Educational only, not medical advice. Your place is saved on this device.

Not medical adviceFMF Companion is an educational synthesis of published literature for study and patient understanding. It does not replace a clinician. Doses and guideline statements are reported as published, not as instructions for any individual.

Part 5 · Context & review

History & people

A disease first sketched in 1908, named in 1958, made treatable in 1972 and explained at the molecular level only after 2014. Press play to run the playhead from 1900 to today, or jump between eras. The scene above the timeline redraws itself as each era arrives.

The scene is a drawing of what changed in each era; every caption in it repeats a milestone below, with that milestone's sources in the note panel. The axis is stretched after 1940 and again after 1990 so crowded recent decades stay readable. The outlook band is qualitative.

Names it has carried

Before 1958 the same illness went by many names, often after the doctors who described it or the people who had it. Click a dated name to jump the timeline. 1

Every milestone

The dots on the timeline are also listed here, so they can be reached with the keyboard and read in order.

What it was called

Exam hookFive dates: 1945 Siegal, "benign paroxysmal peritonitis" · 1958 named FMF at Tel Hashomer (Heller, Sohar, Sherf) · 1972 colchicine (Goldfinger) · 1997 MEFV cloned, protein named pyrin and marenostrin · 2016 RhoA–PKN–14-3-3 keeps pyrin switched off. 71,86,97,109,207,241
In plain wordsFor half a century doctors could describe FMF but not stop it, and many patients died of kidney failure from amyloidosis. A daily pill, colchicine, changed that in the 1970s. The gene was found in 1997, and only in the last decade did scientists work out what the protein actually senses.

FMF Companion is an educational synthesis of the published literature on Familial Mediterranean Fever, made for a health-science course and for patient understanding.

It is not medical advice. It cannot diagnose, and nothing here should change a treatment without your own clinician. Guideline doses are quoted as published. Please check the original sources, which are listed in full in the Sources module.

Part of Medical Companions, animated and cited guides to one disease each. Also there: Alzheimer's Companion, and the Gout Companion, a related guide that also covers colchicine and the IL-1 inflammasome.