Treatment and Prevention
The best way to prevent rheumatic fever is to have strep throat treated with penicillin or other antibiotics. The strep infection should be confirmed with a throat swab before treatment in started and rheumatic fever will be prevented as long as treatment is started within five or six days. Therefore there is time to safely wait for the swab result. The main reason to treat strep throat is to prevent rheumatic fever, because pain killers, hot drinks and gargling would also help the sore throat although the antibiotics make the symptoms disappear about 36 hours sooner.
Although bacteria are responsible for triggering rheumatic fever, once you
have rheumatic fever, antibiotics can do little to help. The normal treatment
for joint inflammation and pain in rheumatic fever is aspirin* or some other
non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID).
Because people who've had rheumatic fever are more prone to further attacks if they get another strep infection, they may be given monthly intramuscular penicillin or daily penicillin treatment by mouth, perhaps for life. If their heart has been damaged by rheumatic fever, they're also given a different antibiotic when they undergo any dental or surgical procedures that increase the risk of bacterial endocarditis.
There's no treatment that will make chorea go away more quickly, though children with chorea are often given antibiotics to prevent endocarditis. Fortunately, the symptoms of chorea often disappear within a few months, although sometimes they may take a year or more to go away.
The rash and the nodules usually clear up on their own.
*All medications have both common (generic) and brand names. The brand name is what a specific manufacturer calls the product (e.g., Tylenol®). The common name is the medical name for the medication (e.g., acetaminophen). A medication may have many brand names, but only one common name. This article lists medications by their common names. For more information on brand names, speak with your doctor or pharmacist.
Janet Lin, MD, Infectious Diseases specialist in Livingston, NJ. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network.