Rheumatology and immunology research最新文献

Social media has unprecedentedly impacted the world, and this includes patients and physicians alike. This article provides a glimpse of the pros and cons of social media to both parties, and how, despite its pitfalls, rheumatologists can put its use in daily practice to help bridge the gap between, and among, rheumatologists and patients to ultimately improve patient outcomes.

Social media has become an important venue for rheumatologists, patients, organizations, and other stakeholders to discuss recent research advances in diagnosis and management of rheumatic disorders. In this article, we describe the current state of how social media may enhance dissemination, discourse, and collaboration in rheumatology research. Social media may refer to social platforms like Twitter and Instagram or digital media like podcasts and other websites that are operated for providing as free, open-access medical education (FOAM). Twitter has been one of the most active social media venues and continues to host a vibrant rheumatology community. Examples of research discussions on Twitter include organic user tweets, educational threads ("tweetorials"), live-tweeting academic conferences, and journals posting recently-accepted articles. Some research collaborations have been initiated through social media interactions. Social media may also directly contribute to research by facilitating the recruitment of study participants and the collection of survey-based data. Thus, social media is an evolving and important tool to enhance research discourse, dissemination, and collaboration in rheumatology.

This review summarizes the history, function, application, and achievement of the RheumCloud App as a novel smartphone application. This App reflects the development of the Chinese Rheumatism Data Center (CRDC), which provides not only a technical platform for the database and registry of rheumatic diseases (RDs) in China, but also a close tie between Chinese rheumatologists and patients with RDs. Throughout the past decade, CRDC has successfully built the world's largest nationwide database for RDs. A total of 2074 tertiary referral centers consisting of 8051 rheumatologists participated in the registry. RheumCloud App, which is representative of the success of CRDC, has played a central role in supporting patient cohort registration, biosample collection, and patient education. Based on the data of the Rhuem-Cloud App, three national key research projects have been funded and a series of research papers have been published.

Rheumatology societies within the Asia Pacific League of Associations for Rheumatology (APLAR) serve a diverse community under challenging circumstances. The Asia-Pacific region is home to one of the fastest-growing social media populations. A survey was carried out to assess the status of these rheumatology societies' official social media platforms. An authentic source of patient information is the need of the hour in the era of digital therapeutics. Going forwards, APLAR should guide societies to establish reliable social media platforms.

Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) is a life- threatening disease that can be secondary to systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). The fist- line treatments of TTP are steroid, immunosuppressor and plasm exchange (PE). However, some patients may have a poor response to these treatments. Bortezomib is a selective proteasome inhibitor and widely used to treat patients with multiple myeloma (MM). In recent years, bortezomib has been used to treat patients with refractory TTP. Here we report a patient with refractory TTP associated with SLE and had a successful treatment with bortezomib.

Objectives: To investigate the effect of olfactory ecto-mesenchymal stem cell-derived exosomes (OE-MSC-Exos) on T follicular helper (Tfh) cell response and their implication in treating experimental Sjögrens syndrome (ESS).

Methods: C57BL/6 mice were immunized with salivary glands (SG) proteins to induce ESS mouse model. OE-MSC-Exos were added to the Tfh cell polarization condition, and the proportion of Tfh cells was detected by FCM. The PD-L1 of OE-MSCs was silenced with small interfering RNA to extract siPD-L1-OE-MSC-Exos.

Results: We found that transfer of OE-MSC-Exos markedly attenuated disease progression and reduced Tfh cell response in mice with ESS. In culture, OE-MSC-Exos potently inhibited the differentiation of Tfh cells from naïve T cells. Moreover, OE-MSC-Exos expressed high level of the ligand for the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-L1), knocking down PD-L1 expression in OE-MSC-Exos significantly decreased their capacity to suppress Tfh cell differentiation in vitro. Consistently, transfer of OE-MSC-Exos with PD-L1 knockdown exhibited profoundly diminished therapeutic effect in ESS mice, accompanied with sustained Tfh cell response and high levels of autoantibody production.

Conclusion: Our results suggest that OE-MSC-Exos may exert their therapeutic effect in ameliorating ESS progression via suppressing Tfh cell response in a PD-L1-dependent manner.

Coronavirus disease is a highly infectious viral disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome virus (SARS nCoV2). It was declared a pandemic within a few months of identification of its index case. The spread of COVID-19 across the globe was rampant, overwhelming healthcare systems and crippling global economies. Since the world was caught off guard by the pandemic, vaccine programs had to be rolled out in emergency to curb its spread. Ten vaccines have been granted Emergency Use Authorization thus far. Much of the side effects we know today are post-marketing adverse effects. Most of them are mild like myalgia and injection-site reactions, but a few of them such as post-vaccination autoimmune diseases have alerted the medical community. These include vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia, autoimmune hepatitis, myocarditis, and Graves' disease. We attempt to summarize the diverse autoimmune phenomena reported after COVID-19 vaccination, with an aim to sensitize the medical community so that they can be better equipped in management when confronted with these diseases. This review by no means refutes the potential benefit of COVID-19 vaccination which has consolidated its place in preventing infections and substantially reducing severity and mortality.

In just a few years, the number of epigenetic studies in autoimmune rheumatic and inflammatory diseases has greatly increased. This is in part due to the need of identifying additional determinants to genetics to explain the pathogenesis and development of these disorders. In this regard, epigenetics provides potential mechanisms that determine gene function, are linked to environmental factors, and could explain a wide range of phenotypic variability among patients with these diseases. Despite the high interest and number of studies describing epigenetic alterations under these conditions and exploring their relationship to various clinical aspects, few of the proposed biomarkers have yet reached clinical practice. The potential of epigenetic markers is high, as these alterations link measurable features with a number of biological traits. In the present article, we present published studies in the field, discuss some frequent limitations in the existing research, and propose a number of considerations that should be taken into account by those starting new projects in the field, with an aim to generate biomarkers that could make it into the clinics.