Are Tattoos Safe in Patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus? Results From a Single-Center Study.

Introduction: Systemic Lupus Erythematosus is a pleiotropic autoimmune disease with common skin involvement. To date, only one study has investigated tattoos safety in SLE patients.

Objective: We performed a single-center study to evaluate the development of local and systemic complications after tattooing in a cohort of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients.

Early decrease of T-bet B cells during subcutaneous belimumab predicts response to therapy in systemic lupus erythematosus patients.

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is characterized by B cell dysregulation and expansion of atypical B cells that may correlate with disease manifestations and activity. This study investigated the impact of subcutaneous (sc) Belimumab (BLM) on the peripheral B cell compartment and on the functional properties of CD21, T-bet and CD11c atypical B cells, in 21 active SLE patients over a 12-month period. At baseline, active SLE patients displayed reduced unswitched IgM memory B cells and expansion of atypical B cells, compared to healthy donors and to SLE patients in remission.

Structural dynamics of calcium and integrin-binding protein 2 (CIB2) reveal uncommon flexibility and heterogeneous calcium and magnesium loading.

Calcium- and Integrin-Binding protein 2 (CIB2) is a widely expressed protein with an uncertain biological role. Two of its four EF-hand motifs bind Mg(II) and/or Ca(II), thus triggering conformational changes. Although previous studies suggested that CIB2 preferentially binds Mg(II) over Ca(II) under physiological conditions, an atomic level characterization of CIB2 in the presence of both cations was lacking.