Autologous peripheral blood stem cell transplantation (auto-PBSCT) after high dose chemotherapy is usually offered to breast cancer patients carrying a high risk of relapse or having chemosensitive metastatic disease. Whether progression free and overall survival of such patients is improved after auto-PBSCT compared to conventional chemotherapy is a matter of debate. Currently available result...

Tom Pettersson, Fourth Department of Medicine, Helsinki University Central Hospital, U. Unioninkatu 38, SF-00170 Helsinki (Finland) Auto-immune haemolytic anaemia and auto-immune thrombocytopenia are well-known manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), but occur much less often in the other connective tissue diseases. We report the case of a patient with scleroderma, who developed s...

Bullous pemphigoid is a subepidermal blistering disease associated with auto-antibodies (auto-ab) to BP180 and BP230. We developed ELISAs utilizing baculovirus-encoded recombinant proteins of BP230 and BP180 and studied their diagnostic and prognostic values by assessing the profile of the auto-ab response in 127 patients with BP. 39 patients had focal involvement, whereas 88 had generalized di...

One of the specific manifestations hemophilia A is spontaneous abdominal hematoma mimicking clinical picture acute disease. The appearance auto-antibodies to FVIII leads a loss response replacement hemostatic therapy and requires an individualized approach as well highly sensitive laboratory monitoring reduce risk uncontrolled bleeding. paper presents case multi-stage surgical treatment this co...

conclusions thyroid dysfunction was not higher in sle patients compared to healthy individuals. however, anti-tg antibodies were higher in sle patients. it has not yet been established that thyroid function tests should be performed routinely in sle patients. results the mean age of sle patients and controls were 32.16 ± 9.19 and 32.48 ± 9.47 years, respectively (p = 0.821). patients had signif...

BACKGROUND The HIV integrase inhibitor raltegravir (RAL) can exacerbate autoimmune diseases in genetically predisposed mice. To evaluate whether this may occur in clinical practice, we clinically monitored HIV-positive patients treated with RAL and measured a panel of autoantibodies (auto-Abs) during the first year of RAL treatment. METHODS This was a longitudinal study in 109 antiretroviral-...

BACKGROUND Antibodies to chromatin and soluble liver antigen have been associated with severe form of autoimmune hepatitis and/or poor treatment response and may provide guidance in defining subsets of patients with different disease behaviors. The major clinical limitation of these antibodies is their lower individual occurrence in patients with autoimmune hepatitis. AIM To estimate the valu...

To verify the possible effect of IFN-beta treatment on auto antibodies development in multiple sclerosis (MS) we studied 69 MS patients before and during the treatment with IFN-beta 1b (n=35) and IFN-beta 1a (n=20) for 27 and 12 months respectively, and, as controls, 14 untreated MS patients. The serum, collected every 3 months from all the patients, was investigated for the presence of antinuc...

BACKGROUND A severe encephalitis that associates with auto-antibodies to the NR1 subunit of the NMDA receptor (NMDA-R) was recently reported. Patients' antibodies cause a decrease of the density of NMDA-R and synaptic mediated currents, but the in vivo effects on the extracellular glutamate and glutamatergic transmission are unknown. METHODS We investigated the acute metabolic effects of pati...