Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is an autoimmune connective tissue disorder. Anorectal involvement might typically cause fecal incontinence and rarely rectal prolapse. Here we report three female patients, who were admitted with a mean history of 10 years suffering from SSc. All patients presented with the initial symptom of anal incontinence, in all cases this was associated with rectal intussuscepti...

BACKGROUND Neurological involvement occurs rarely with systemic sclerosis (SSc). Only a few cases of transverse myelopathy have been reported in the setting of SSc. OBJECTIVE To describe a patient with SSc who developed transverse myelitis that improved during a course of immunosuppression. RESULTS A 30-year-old woman with SSc presented with subacute onset of bilateral lower extremity weakn...

Interstitial lung disease (ILD) is a commonly encountered complication of systemic sclerosis (SSc) and accounts for a significant proportion of SSc-associated morbidity and mortality. Its pathogenesis remains poorly understood, and therapies that treat SSc ILD are suboptimal, at best. SSc ILD pathogenesis may share some common mechanisms with other fibrotic lung diseases, in which dysregulation...

OBJECTIVE To study collagen metabolites in systemic sclerosis (SSc) and their relationship with clinical manifestations of the disease. METHODS Forty-eight SSc patients, 13 with a diffuse form (dcSSc), 23 with a limited form (lcSSc) and 12 with suspected SSc not fulfilling the ACR criteria, and 31 healthy controls were examined. Serum concentrations of aminoterminal type III procollagen pepti...

OBJECTIVE Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc), a chronic disabling disease associated to physical and psychological impairment, is often left behind in clinical practice and research. This is due to the use of tools that are not complete or mainly designed for the physical condition only. We tested EQ-5D, a valid, simple and brief questionnaire for H...

Many important observations suggest monocyte/macrophage involvement in systemic sclerosis (SSc). A high concentration of immune mediators, such as IL-6, IL-10 and IL-13, the infiltration of mononuclear cells in affected organs and the production of autoantibodies suggest that immune system dysfunction drives SSc pathogenesis. The recently reported study by Higashi-Kuwata and colleagues, in ligh...

The role of the vascular microenvironment in the pathogenesis Systemic Sclerosis (SSc) is appreciated clinically as Raynaud's syndrome with capillary nail bed change. This manifestation of vasculopathy is used diagnostically in both limited and diffuse cutaneous subsets of SSc, and is thought to precede fibrosis. The degree of subsequent fibrosis may also be determined by the vascular microenvi...

Background There is growing evidence supporting an association between gut microbiota and the risk of systemic sclerosis (SSc)[1]. However, causal relationship SSc remains ambiguous. Objectives A two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis was performed to reveal SSc. Methods We obtained data on intestinal flora from MR-base website [2] 218,499 samples for IEU database a MR analysis. Inver...

Previous study suggested that signal transducers and activators of transcription-4 (STAT4) rs7574865 polymorphism may play an important role in susceptibility to Systemic Sclerosis (SSc) in Chinese. However, no further study was conducted to confirm this result. Thus, we did a case-control study. 174 SSc patients and 202 controls were enrolled in this study. When the STAT4 rs7574865 polymorphis...

BACKGROUND Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a connective tissue disease characterised by vascular changes and immunologically induced fibrosis of the skin and internal organs. Systemic sclerosis may be associated with both right (RV) and left ventricular (LV) diastolic dysfunction. AIM To analyse RV and LV myocardial diastolic function in patients with SSc and its relation to exercise capacity. ...