OBJECTIVES The Digital Ulcers Outcome (DUO) Registry was designed to describe the clinical and antibody characteristics, disease course and outcomes of patients with digital ulcers associated with systemic sclerosis (SSc). METHODS The DUO Registry is a European, prospective, multicentre, observational, registry of SSc patients with ongoing digital ulcer disease, irrespective of treatment regi...

BACKGROUND Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a multisystem autoimmune disease, which is classified into a diffuse cutaneous (dcSSc) and a limited cutaneous (lcSSc) subset according to the skin involvement. In order to better understand the vascular, immunological and fibrotic processes of SSc and to guide its treatment, the EULAR Scleroderma Trials And Research (EUSTAR) group was formed in June 2004....

Because the current assessment of scleroderma skin through clinical skin scoring is subjective and imprecise, we investigated fully quantitative, physical measures of cutaneous involvement in the disease. First, we developed image analysis software for calculating the dermal density of colla-gen from 58 scleroderma and 327 control biopsies scanned onto our computer. Second, using a durometer ga...

INTRODUCTION In systemic sclerosis (SSc) little evidence for the effectiveness of anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive therapy exists. The objective of this study was to determine the extent to which SSc patients are treated with corticosteroids and immunosuppressive agents. METHODS Data on duration and dosage of corticosteroids and on the type of immunosuppressive agent were analyzed from...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the presence of anti-fibroblast antibodies in patients with idiopathic or scleroderma-associated pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) and healthy controls. PAH was documented by right-heart catheterisation (mean pulmonary artery pressure at rest >25 mmHg). Serum immunoglobulin (Ig)G and IgM reactivities of patients with idiopathic PAH (n = 35), s...

1 Division of Oral Biology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada 2 Centre for Rheumatology, University College London (Royal Free Campus), UK Background Activated adhesive signaling is a hallmark of fibroblasts isolated from scars of scleroderma (systemic sclerosis; SSc) lesions. Rac1 plays a key role in adhesive signaling. The aim of the present study was to examine the role of Ra...

Experience suggests that African Americans may express autoimmune disease differently than other racial groups. In the context of systemic sclerosis (scleroderma), we sought to determine whether race was related to a more adverse expression of disease. Between January 1, 1990, and December 31, 2009, a total of 409 African American and 1808 white patients with scleroderma were evaluated at a sin...

Drug-induced scleroderma is a rare adverse effect of some chemotherapeutic drugs, such as taxanes and bleomycin. Capecitabine, an oral fluoropyrimidine approved for the treatment of metastatic breast and colon cancer, commonly causes cutaneous side effects including the hand-and-foot syndrome (HFS). Scleroderma-like skin changes associated with HFS associated with capecitabine is rare. However,...