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In this Viewpoint, Drs Doria and Briani highlight recent advances in efforts to improve the long-term prognosis of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. The strategies discussed aim to prevent both the occurrence of the disease and its complications.
Hypermobility-related disorders are frequently encountered in clinical practice, but are too often dismissed as trivial. In this Viewpoint, Prof. Grahame discusses why the current perception of these disorders is inadequate, and highlights recent advances in the field as well as challenges and opportunities for future research and therapy.
'Growing pains' is a term that has been applied for almost 200 years to describe and diagnose some forms of childhood limb pain. To date no clear mechanism has been identified. The authors present a thorough historical Review of the physical presentation, differential diagnoses, potential causative factors and management options for this phenomenon.
Glucocorticoids are powerful and cost-effective drugs for the treatment of patients with rheumatic disease; however, currently available glucocorticoids have several adverse effects. This Review describes the genomic and nongenomic mechanisms of glucocorticoid action; detailed knowledge of these mechanisms is crucial for researchers to develop novel glucocorticoid receptor ligands and/or to further improve the use of currently available conventional glucocorticoids.
The introduction of mycophenolate mofetil to the treatment armamentarium for lupus nephritis raised the hope that the use of cyclophosphamide, with its toxic effects, would decrease. In this Review, the authors summarize the current knowledge of therapies for proliferative and membranous lupus nephritis and propose a treatment scheme, not of one therapy over another, but one that is tailored to the individual patient profile.
In this second in a series of three Reviews on Wnt–β-catenin signaling, Prof. Schett and colleagues discuss the molecular regulation of joint remodeling associated with chronic arthritis and the role of Wnt proteins in determining the differences in clinical presentation of inflammatory arthropathies, as well as implications for future therapy.
Although autoantibodies occur in healthy individuals, pathogenic autoantibodies are the key etiologic agent in many autoimmune diseases in humans, most notably lupus erythematosus. In this Review the authors explore how these autoantibodies become pathogenic, what accounts for their specificity, how they cause disease and whether they have a clinical role as biomarkers of disease.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been implicated in the pathogenesis of rheumatic disease and are, therefore, a potential target for drug development. This Review describes the well-established roles of miRNAs in hematopoiesis and the immune response, the molecular action of miRNAs in the simultaneous post-transcriptional regulation of multiple targets, and the evidence for roles of specific miRNAs in rheumatic disease.