Scope: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection has become pandemic, reaching almost one million death worldwide. At present standard treatment for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is not well defined because the evidence, either from randomized or observational studies, with conflicting results, has led to rapid changes in treatment guidelines. Our aim was to narratively summarize the available literature on the management of COVID-19 in order to combine current evidence and interpretation of the data by experts who are treating patients in the frontline setting. Methods: The panel conducted a detailed review of the literature and eventual press releases from randomized clinical trials for each possible available treatment. Inductive PubMed search waws performed for publications relevant to the topic, including all clinical trials conducted. The result was a flowchart with treatment indications for patients with COVID-19. Implications: After 6 months of a pandemic situation and before a possible second coronavirus wave descends on Europe, it is important to evaluate which drugs proved to be effective while also considering that results from many randomized clinical trials are still awaited. Indeed, among treatments for COVID-19, only glucocorticoids have resulted in an association with a significant decrease in mortality in
Chronic graft versus host disease (cGVHD), the most common late complication of allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), may present with sclerodermatous lesions resembling in some cases the cutaneous involvement of systemic sclerosis (SSc). Certain pathogenetic findings connect the two diseases. In this report we describe ten subjects affected by cGVHD who underwent the examinations routinely carried out to stage SSc patients. Demographic, clinical, serologic and instrumental data were recorded. These patients showed differences in appearance, extent and progression of the sclerodermatous lesions with greater involvement of the trunk and proximal part of the limbs than the extremities. In seven subjects ANA test was positive; scleroderma-associated autoantibodies were not detected in any of the cases. Moreover, typical organ involvement of SSc was not found. Only one patient developed Raynauds phenomenon after HSCT and only one patient demonstrated a nailfold videocapillaroscopic scleroderma pattern. Except for cutaneous involvement of cGVHD, that may resemble SSc, the clinical features of the two diseases are quite different, suggesting that the fibrotic process characterizing cGVHD and SSc has different etiologies and different initial pathobiologic events.
Serum IgE determinations and coproparasitological analyses were carried out on 161 individuals from two distinct ethnic groups (Hutus and Twas) from two regions in Rwanda (North and South). The cumulative parasitosis index (calculated for each individual as the sum of the scores for the four most frequent intestinal parasites) shows a linear relation with IgE levels up to a plateau, with no clear pattern of correlation between the score for any given parasite and the IgE level. Such a direct quantitative (but not qualitative) relation reproposes the question on the role of IgE immunoglobulins in intestinal parasitoses.
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