Connective tissue diseases are a rare and poorly understood etiology of trigeminal neuropathy. In a retrospective multicentric study covering 12 years. 12 cases were identified in the archives of the Departments of Neurology, Rheumatology and Internal Medicine: 4 were associated with progressive systemic sclerosis. 4 with mixed connective tissue diseases and 4 with Sjögren's syndrome. In 9 of t...

Thirty-four patients with connective tissue disease used dexamethasone drops 0.1% in one eye for 6 weeks. There was a higher incidence of positive steroid response than would be expected in a normal population. Most of the male patients were responders. Care should be exercised when prescribing local steroids for these patients. Males should be offered regular screening for glaucoma.

Systemic connective tissue diseases (CTDs) are disease entities characterized by a systemic and heterogeneous spectrum of clinical symptoms. The treatment of CDTs has improved substantially, but with the developments of new and probably more expensive targeted therapies, there will be a need of rigorous evaluation in patient-oriented research. Proposed domains for outcome measurement of CTDs ar...

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is an entity that is known to complicate connective tissue diseases (CTD). PAH in CTD is a very important diagnosis which greatly affects treatment and prognosis. The most commonly affected CTD is scleroderma, although lupus, inflammatory myopathies such as poly and dermatomyositis, and mixed CTD are also associated with PAH. The manifestations of PAH have ...

Extra Musculoskeletal manifestations are a distinct clinical entity that refers to a combination of clinical features, which are found in multiple rheumatic diseases. Besides the standard manifestations, other organs can be damaged such as the vascular system, skin, gastrointestinal tract, musculoskeletal system, cardiopulmonary system, hematologic system, kidneys, and the central nervous syste...

Lysosomes are small intracellular organelles present in most or all cells of animals of widely different evolutionary development. In general their diameter may vary from 0(2 to 0(5 ,tm so that they overlap the dimensions of mitochondria. In the original differential centrifugation studies they were isolated as the 'light mitochondrial' fraction. It is difficult to give an exact size to these o...