Jianqiu Huang,1,* Xingyu Mu,2,* Shaohu Tang,3 Huali Zhou,4 Yang Lu,5 Ming Zhang,3 Danfeng Zhu3 

1Department of Dermatology, Clinical Research Center, Hainan Hospital, Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Haikou, Hainan, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Dermatology, The People’s Hospital of Peng’an County, Nanchong, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Imaging, The Fifth People’s Hospital of Hainan Province, Haikou, Hainan, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Ophthalmology, The Fifth People’s Hospital of Hainan Province, Haikou, Hainan, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Pathology, The Fifth People’s Hospital of Hainan Province, Haikou, Hainan, People’s Republic of China

*These authors contributed equally to this work

Correspondence: Ming Zhang, Department of Dermatology, The Fifth People’s Hospital of Hainan Province, Haikou, Hainan, People’s Republic of China, Email zhang103214@163.com Danfeng Zhu, Department of Imaging, The Fifth People’s Hospital of Hainan Province, Haikou, Hainan, People’s Republic of China, Email 1032339635@qq.com

Abstract: Relapsing polychondritis is a rare immunologic disorder that can involve all cartilage and proteoglycan-rich tissues. Clinical symptoms of relapsing polychondritis are often associated with recurrent inflammatory manifestations and functional impairment of such tissues. The disease has an insidious onset, and the first symptoms and clinical manifestations vary, making it easy to misdiagnose and miss the diagnosis. Here, we report a case of relapsing polychondritis with multi-systemic disease in a single ear and a single eye. A 44-year-old Chinese man suddenly developed redness, swelling, and pain in the right auricle without any causative factors half a year ago, followed by other multi-systemic symptoms, and he went to an outside hospital several times. He was diagnosed with sinusitis and bronchitis after completing some investigations in a foreign hospital, and his condition did not improve after taking oral medication, so he came to our hospital and was diagnosed with relapsing polychondritis after completing some investigations.

Keywords: relapsing polychondritis, auricular chondritis, systemic autoimmune disease, diagnosis