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Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease characterized by erosive arthritis, which can involve multiple systems. Patients with RA may have a variety of comorbidities, including cardiovascular disease (CVD), lung cancer, lymphoma, infection, osteoporosis, fatigue, depression, colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and Alzheimer's disease. Among these comorbidities, the incidence of CVD, lung cancer, lymphoma, infection, and osteoporosis is higher. CVD is a serious complication of RA. The risk of CVD and associated mortality rate in patients with RA is high, and the treatment rate is low. In addition to traditional risk factors, such as age, sex, blood pressure, and diabetes, RA is also associated with inflammation. Furthermore, therapeutic drugs for RA, including non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, glucocorticoids, and disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs, have beneficial or harmful effects on cardiovascular events in patients with RA. This article discusses the effects of therapeutic drugs for RA on cardiovascular events.

A 69-year-old man presented with dark-red shin patches, scales with pruritus occuring throughout his body for 3 years, with aggravation for 4 months. Laboratory tests showed peripheral blood eosinophilia was 12.07 x 109/L and IgE level was 9 379 kU/L while his anti-BP180 antibody level was higher than 200 U/mL. Histopathological examination revealed: epidermal hyperkeratosis, incomplete keratinization, focal exudate, thickened spiny layer, intercellular oedema, mild lymphocytic and eosinophilic and phagocytic infiltration around the superficial dermal vessels. Direct immunofluorescence assay ( DIF) detected a linear deposition of C3 at the basement membrane zone. Indirect immunofluorescence assay (IIF) revealed a positive pemphigoid circulating antibody IgG titre of 1-160. IIF on salt-split skin revealed the binding of IgG antibodies to both the epidermal and dermal. The diagnosis of nonbullous pemphigoid (NBP) was made. However, no improvement in his itching symptom and his eczematous lesions persisted with dupilumab as monotherapy for three months, then the flaking stopped and pruritus was reduced combined with oral prednisone for three months. The patient was followed up for one year and no blisters were found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Hongda. Li, Guizhi. Zhou, Hong. Liu, Baoqi. Yang, Guangjin. Wang, Zhaoxia. Zhang Sir, Folliculotropic Mycosis fungoides (FMF) and granulomatous mycosis fungoides (GMF) are two rare variants of Mycosis Fungoides [...]

The present study investigated the developmental trajectories of written language of two Chinese EFL learners in terms of complexity over one semester and explored the relationship between syntactic complexity and lexical complexity under the framework of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). The data were processed using dynamic analyses (min-max graphs, moving correlations and Change-point analysis) to visualize the developmental process and variability of each subsystem of complexity with 4 measures (mean length of T-unit, mean length of clause, clauses per T-unit and VocD) and interactions between different subsystems. The results showed, first, that different subsystems of written language complexity developed dynamically and nonlinearly with different degrees of variability, and varied in the two participants. Second, interactions existed between syntactic complexity and lexical complexity, which shaped as competitors for Jenny but as connected growers for Helen. The results further deepened the understanding of the development in learners' written complexity, providing significant implications for EFL writing teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Primary Sjögren's syndrome (pSS) is an autoimmune disease that leads to the destruction of exocrine glands and multisystem lesions. Abnormal proliferation, apoptosis, and differentiation of CD4+ T cells are key factors in the pathogenesis of pSS. Autophagy is one of the important mechanisms to maintain immune homeostasis and function of CD4+ T cells. Human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cell-derived exosomes (UCMSC-Exos) may simulate the immunoregulation of MSCs while avoiding the risks of MSCs treatment. However, whether UCMSC-Exos can regulate the functions of CD4+ T cells in pSS, and whether the effects via the autophagy pathway remains unclear. Methods: The study analyzed retrospectively the peripheral blood lymphocyte subsets in pSS patients, and explored the relationship between lymphocyte subsets and disease activity. Next, peripheral blood CD4+ T cells were sorted using immunomagnetic beads. The proliferation, apoptosis, differentiation, and inflammatory factors of CD4+ T cells were determined using flow cytometry. Autophagosomes of CD4+ T cells were detected using transmission electron microscopy, autophagy-related proteins and genes were detected using western blotting or RT-qPCR. Results: The study demonstrated that the peripheral blood CD4+ T cells decreased in pSS patients, and negatively correlated with disease activity. UCMSC-Exos inhibited excessive proliferation and apoptosis of CD4+ T cells in pSS patients, blocked them in the G0/G1 phase, inhibited them from entering the S phase, reduced the Th17 cell ratio, elevated the Treg ratio, inhibited IFN-γ, TNF-α, IL-6, IL-17A, and IL-17F secretion, and promoted IL-10 and TGF-β secretion. UCMSC-Exos reduced the elevated autophagy levels in the peripheral blood CD4+ T cells of patients with pSS. Furthermore, UCMSC-Exos regulated CD4+ T cell proliferation and early apoptosis, inhibited Th17 cell differentiation, promoted Treg cell differentiation, and restored the Th17/Treg balance in pSS patients through the autophagy pathway. Conclusions: The study indicated that UCMSC-Exos exerts an immunomodulatory effect on the CD4+ T cells, and maybe as a new treatment for pSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lung infection image segmentation is a key technology for autonomous understanding of the potential illness. However, current approaches usually lose the low-level details, which leads to a considerable accuracy decrease for lung infection areas with varied shapes and sizes. In this paper, we propose bilateral progressive compensation network (BPCN), a bilateral progressive compensation network to improve the accuracy of lung lesion segmentation through complementary learning of spatial and semantic features. The proposed BPCN are mainly composed of two deep branches. One branch is the multi-scale progressive fusion for main region features. The other branch is a flow-field based adaptive body-edge aggregation operations to explicitly learn detail features of lung infection areas which is supplement to region features. In addition, we propose a bilateral spatial-channel down-sampling to generate a hierarchical complementary feature which avoids losing discriminative features caused by pooling operations. Experimental results show that our proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation methods in lung infection segmentation on two public image datasets with or without a pseudo-label training strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Xiaofeng. Shan, Changliang. Wang, Hongqing. Tian, Baoqi. Yang, Furen. Zhang Sir Conventional narrow-band ultraviolet B (NB-UVB) therapy entails frequent visits to a hospital-based phototherapy unit over several months. The [...]

Background: Vitiligo is an acquired, idiopathic skin disorder that can significantly affect the health-related quality of life (QoL). The vitiligo-specific QoL instrument (VitiQoL), recently developed by an American group, was found to be a reliable patient-reported outcome measure in both Brazilian and Iranian patients. Methods: The VitiQoL was initially cross-culturally adapted to Chinese through forward-backward translation. The Chinese version of the VitiQoL was then distributed to 182 vitiligo patients together with the dermatology life quality index (DLQI) and Skindex-16 questionnaire. Then, the reliability and validity of the Chinese version of the VitiQoL was assessed by statistical analysis. Results: The Chinese version of the VitiQoL showed high internal consistency (Cronbach alpha = 0.958) and test–retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.887). Convergent validity testing showed that the correlation coefficient for the Chinese VitiQoL and DLQI was 0.70 (P < 0.01), the Chinese VitiQoL and Skindex-16 each was 0.84 (P < 0.01), and for the Chinese VitiQoL (questions 1–15 and 16) was 0.62 (P < 0.01). Confirmatory factor analysis revealed two important factors within the VitiQoL: Participation limitation and stigma. Conclusion: The Chinese version of the VitiQoL questionnaire has sufficient reliability and validity to be used to evaluate Chinese vitiligo patients' QoL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Baoqi. Yang, Chong. Wang, Shengli. Chen, Xuechao. Chen, Xianmei. Lu, Hongqing. Tian, Meiling. Yu, Dizhan. Zhang, Zhongxiang. Shi, Guizhi. Zhou, Furen. Zhang Background: Bullous pemphigoid (BP) is an acquired [...]

Byline: Xiaofeng. Shan, Changliang. Wang, Baoqi. Yang, Furen. Zhang Sir, Ultraviolet B (UVB) phototherapy is widely used to treat psoriasis, but treatment in whole-body narrowband UVB (NB-UVB) cabins may cause [...]

Byline: Baoqi. Yang, Chong. Wang, Shengli. Chen, Xuechao. Chen, Guizhi. Zhou, Hongqing. Tian, Meiling. Yu, Dizhan. Zhang, Zhongxiang. Shi, Furen. Zhang Background: Previous reports have shown that indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) [...]