The case is described of a patient with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who developed heart failure and vasculitis and died of a myocardial infarction. Autopsy showed vasculitis of several major epicardial coronary arteries. Coronary arteritis in a patient with RA is seldom diagnosed during their lifetime but should be suspected when such a patient develops ischaemic heart disease.

Rheumatoid vasculitis is a rare, but most serious extra-articular complications of long-standing, seropositive rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Vasculitis of hepatic artery is an extremely rare but severe manifestation of rheumatoid vasculitis. A 72-year-old woman who presented with polyarthralgia for 2 months was diagnosed with early RA. Since she had manifestations of livedo reticularis, and liver ...

The occurrence of vascular lesions in rheumatoid arthritis has been recognized for some time, but interest in them has been of a sporadic nature until recently. In the last few years American workers have published more detailed studies of arteritis in skeletal muscles, subcutaneous nodules, and synovial tissue (Sokoloff and others, 1951, 1953). Sokoloff and his colleagues regarded the lesion i...

There is a fairly common form of rheumatism which afflicts the elderly with pains in the head, neck, back, and proximal parts of the limbs, with stiffness of movement and with constitutional illness. It is associated with a raised sedimentation rate (E.S.R.) and a mild hypergammaglobulinaemia, and women are affected more frequently than men. There is as yet no specific test for this condition, ...

Sera from 21 patients with arteritis of the aorta and great vessels were studied. The mean level of IgG, IgM, and IgA immunoglobulin was raised. The incidence of rheumatoid and antinuclear factor and antibodies to aorta, liver, and thyroid was not raised.

The association between actinic granuloma and giant cell arteritis (temporal arteritis) has been claimed by some authors. There is a hypothesis that actinic radiation has the principal role in the etiology of both diseases in a similar way. Here, we report a case of actinic granuloma that had characteristic pathologic features of giant cell arteritis in histopathologic examination without clini...

A close examination of the hands of people depicted in paintings of the Flemish school showed that in five paintings there were figures with hand lesions resembling those of rhematoid arthritis. Although none of the deformities or swellings are indisputable examples of rheumatoid arthritis, they do at least suggest that the painters must have been confronted with rheumatoid-like lesions in thei...

Takayasu arteritis (TA) is a chronic inflammatory disease of large arteries which progressively develop stenosis, occlusion or aneurismal degeneration. Proinflammatory cytokines and, among these, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) are increased and play a pathogenetic role in the development of disease. Conventional therapy often fails to determine clinical remission and, in these cases, p...