Background And Objective: Convalescent plasma therapy (CPT) may reduce the risk of disease progression among patients with COVID-19. This study was undertaken to evaluate the efficacy and safety of CPT in preventing ICU admission among hospitalized COVID-19 patients.
Methods: In this open-label randomized controlled trial, we randomly assigned hospitalized adult patients with COVID-19 in a 1:1 ratio to receive convalescent plasma as an adjunct to standard of care or standard of care alone.
A 54-Year-Old Woman with Cutaneous NodulesA 54-year-old woman presented with chronic cutaneous nodules and plaques. How do you approach the evaluation, and what is the diagnosis?
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Convalescent plasma has been widely used to treat COVID-19 and is under investigation in numerous randomized clinical trials, but results are publicly available only for a small number of trials. The objective of this study was to assess the benefits of convalescent plasma treatment compared to placebo or no treatment and all-cause mortality in patients with COVID-19, using data from all available randomized clinical trials, including unpublished and ongoing trials (Open Science Framework, https://doi.org/10.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF: Serum IgG4 is typically measured to investigate for Immunoglobulin G4-related Disease (IgG4-RD), a fibroinflammatory condition associated with polyclonal increase in serum IgG4. However, increased IgG4 can also be monoclonal, and little is known about IgG4 myeloma. : We describe two cases of IgG4 myeloma without clinical, radiologic, or laboratory features of IgG4-related disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRed cell distribution width (RDW) and neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) are potential low-cost markers for detecting rheumatoid arthritis (RA) disease activity, but evidence on their accuracy for this purpose is conflicting. We aimed to determine the relationship between these and the Disease Activity Score of 28 joints (DAS-28) among Filipino RA patients, and to evaluate their ability to discriminate between patients with active RA and those in remission. This was a cross-sectional study done through a 7-year review of medical records of 134 adult patients with RA in a tertiary government hospital.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Hypereosinophilia (HE, persistent peripheral blood eosinophilia > 1.5 × 10 /L) and hypereosinophilic syndrome (HES, HE with end-organ damage) are classified as primary (due to a myeloid clone), secondary (due to a wide variety of reactive causes), or idiopathic. Diagnostic evaluation of eosinophilia is challenging, in part because secondary causes of HE/HES such as lymphocyte-variant HES (L-HES) and vasculitis are difficult to diagnose, and emerging causes such as immunoglobulin G4-related disease (IgG4-RD) have rarely been examined.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article will review the structure and function of IgG4, methods of measuring serum IgG4 concentrations, clinical conditions associated with increased and decreased serum IgG4, and the test characteristics of serum IgG4 in the diagnosis and management of Immunoglobulin G4-Related Disease (IgG4-RD). The four subclasses of IgG were discovered in 1964 through experiments on monoclonal IgG in patients with myeloma. Since 2001, interest in measuring serum IgG subclasses has increased dramatically due to the emergence of IgG4-RD, a multisystem fibroinflammatory condition wherein polyclonal serum IgG4 concentration is increased in approximately 70% of cases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBone marrow abnormalities in SLE are now becoming increasingly recognized, suggesting that the bone marrow may also be an important site of target organ damage. In this study, we present a rare case of concurrent autoimmune hemophagocytic syndrome and autoimmune myelofibrosis, potentially life-threatening conditions, in a newly diagnosed SLE patient. We report a case of a 30-year-old Filipino woman who presented with a one-year history of fever, constitutional symptoms, exertional dyspnea, joint pains, and alopecia and physical examination findings of fever, facial flushing, cervical lymphadenopathies, and knee joint effusions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPosterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome (PRES) is a rare and poorly understood neurologic condition that has been described in some patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Intracerebral hemorrhage is a unique and atypical presentation of PRES and has been described only in a small number of patients with SLE. We present the case of a 33-year-old female, diagnosed with SLE and active nephritis, who was admitted for seizures.
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