A 26-year old woman with diffuse active lupus nephritis showed no proteinuria. Electron microscopy revealed a typical fingerprint pattern in glomerular subendothelial electron dense deposits. Out of 21 renal biopsy cases of lupus nephritis, we found fingerprint deposits in 4 cases (19%) including the present case. All of the cases showed diffuse proliferative glomerulonephritis with overt prote...

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a classic antibody-mediated systemic autoimmune disease characterised by the development of autoantibodies to ubiquitous self-antigens (such as antinuclear antibodies and antidouble-stranded DNA antibodies) and widespread deposition of immune complexes in affected tissues. Deposition of immune complexes in the kidney results in glomerular damage and occurs ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Studies of the impact of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and its pregnancy complications have yielded conflicting results. Major limitations of these studies relate to their small numbers of patients and retrospective designs. The aim of this study was to perform a systematic literature review of pregnancy outcomes in women with SLE and a meta-analysis of the associ...

BACKGROUND The treatment of Lupus Nephritis (LN) is an unmet need in the management of patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE). CASE PRESENTATION : We report two cases of women affected by Lupus Nephritis (LN) ISN/RNP Class IV with serological active disease, high disease activity and marked fatigue. In both cases, Mycophenolate mofetil (MMF), as induction therapy, was poorly tolerated...

We report the clinical and pathologic findings in 7 patients with systemic lupus erythematosus and minimal change disease. All 7 patients presented with full nephrotic syndrome including peripheral edema, nephrotic range proteinuria (mean 9.6 g/day), and hypoalbuminemia (mean 1.8 g/dl). In all cases, renal biopsy revealed diffuse foot process effacement in the absence of significant peripheral ...

In lupus erythematosus, elevated serum creatinine levels and urinary abnormalities implicate a kidney disorder, which may not always be lupus nephritis as defined by the current classification of the International Society of Nephrology/Renal Pathology Society. The signs of renal dysfunction may be caused by lupusunrelated renal injury such as drug toxicity or infection or by lupus-associated me...

Kidney disease is one of the most serious manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Despite the improvement in the medical care of SLE in the past two decades, the prognosis of lupus nephritis remains unsatisfactory. Besides exploring more effective but less toxic treatment modalities that will further improve the remission rate, early detection and treatment of renal activity may s...

INTRODUCTION Type I interferons are pivotal in the activation of autoimmune response in systemic lupus erythematous. However, the pathogenic role of interferon-alpha in patients affected by lupus nephritis remains uncertain. The aim of our study was to investigate the presence of a specific interferon signature in lupus nephritis and the effects of interferon-alpha at renal level. METHODS We ...

OBJECTIVE Recent clinical trials in lupus nephritis have all used different criteria to assess complete response. The objective of this analysis was to compare several previously proposed criteria, using the same data set from a large trial of abatacept in lupus nephritis (IM101075). In so doing, we sought to determine which criteria are most sensitive to differences among treatment groups and ...

The combination of systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjogren's disease and severe diffuse glomerular nephritis has only rarely been reported. A 14-year-old girl is described with lupus nephritis in whom co-existent clinical and histological features of Sjogren's syndrome were found. These include bilateral parotid enlargement, xerostomia, increased serum amylase, reduced salivary secretion and lymp...