Several abnormalities of cytokines have been shown to occur in systemic scleroderma; however their correlation with clinical parameters is controversial. Since serum concentrations of cytokine receptors have been shown to correlate with inflammatory processes, including systemic sclerosis, the aim of our study was to compare serum concentrations of TNF alpha receptor type 1 with the concentrati...

Introduction: Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a late progressive sclerodermarelated complication, which can lead to right heart failure and cor pulmonale. Given that cardiac catheterization is a diagnostic method of choice for PAH, and considering the high risks of this method, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the relationship between serum Pro‐Brain natriuretic peptide (Pro‐B...

Cell-mediated immunity to skin extracts was studied by the macrophage migration inhibition test, lymphocyte transformation, and direct cytotoxicity to skin fibroblasts, in normal individuals and patients with progressive systemic sclerosis. The latter included 18 individuals with diffuse scleroderma and 12 with the CREST syndrome, a variant form of systemic sclerosis in which there is more limi...

Scleroderma renal crisis has been documented as the presenting manifestation of systemic sclerosis sine scleroderma in pregnancy only once in the literature. Unfortunately, since scleroderma renal crisis in sine scleroderma pregnant patients is so rare, that patient expired. We present a case of a sine scleroderma pregnant patient with an initial manifestation of scleroderma renal crisis surviv...

Scleroderma is a rare disease. Approximately 80% of patients are females, and one-half present before the age of 40. Some studies suggest a higher incidence and severity of disease in black females than in whites. Scleroderma affect approximately 20 new patients per million per year and has an estimated prevalence of approximately 250 patients per million in the United States, the synonyms from...

Department of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology, Sahara Hospital, Lucknow, India, 226010 [email protected] Scleroderma or progressive systemic sclerosis is diagnosed clinically by typical features of skin thickening, Raynaud’s phenomenon and visceral organ involvement, and serologically by distinct autoantibody subsets. These differentiate the disease into the ‘limited’ and ‘diffuse’ vari...

BACKGROUND Studies on gastrointestinal symptoms, dysfunctions, and neurological disorders in systemic scleroderma are lacking so far. METHODS Thirty-eight scleroderma patients (34 limited, 4 diffuse), 60 healthy controls and 68 dyspeptic controls were scored for upper and lower gastrointestinal symptoms (dyspepsia, bowel habits), gastric and gallbladder emptying to liquid meal (functional ult...

While a number of studies have shown short-term beneficial effects of plasmapheresis (PA) for treating systemic scleroderma (SSc), there have been no reports on the very long-term usage of PA as the sole systemic treatment intervention. We report on the case of a male patient, originally diagnosed with limited systemic scleroderma (lcSSc) in early 1990, who has been undergoing regular plasmaphe...

©2014 Turkish League Against Rheumatism. All rights reserved. Juvenile systemic scleroderma is a rare chronic multi-system connective tissue disease in childhood. Although rare in children, it is an important cause of morbidity and mortality. Juvenile systemic scleroderma is one of the most severe rheumatologic conditions diagnosed in children. In this article, we report a six-year-old boy diag...