Impact of pregnancy on progression of preclinical autoimmune disorders: a prospective cohort study.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to evaluate the role of pregnancies in the progression from the preclinical phase of autoimmune disorder to a definite rheumatic disease.

Methods: A cohort study of women with symptoms and laboratory findings suggestive for autoimmune disorder were enrolled during the first trimester of pregnancy and followed-up for 5 years with clinical and laboratory assessment. Multinomial logistic regression was used to compute the risk of progression to definite autoimmune disease correcting for confounders.

The impact of various entities of antiphospholipid antibodies positivity on adverse pregnancy outcome. An epidemiological perspective.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the rate of obstetric complications and the burden of obstetric outcomes in antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), non-criteria APS and asymptomatic antiphospholipid antibodies (aPL) carriers. From 2013-2018, 163 pregnant subjects with aPL antibodies and 785 controls were enrolled. Penalized logistic regression was used to compare obstetric complications.

Coverbal gestures in Alzheimer's type dementia.

Patterns of conversational gestures were analysed in subjects with Alzheimer's type dementia (DAT), fluent aphasics with a primarily lexical-semantic deficit (FA) and normal subjects. The FA subjects produced twice as many gestures as the normal participants with a normal percentage of gestures that showed semantic features of the lexical items in concurrent speech (iconic). A comparable lexical-semantic deficit together with a deficit in conceptual organisation of information corresponded to a normal gesturing rate in the DAT subjects; however, the percentage of iconic gestures was reduced.

Referential communication in Alzheimer's type dementia.

This paper investigates factors that underlie reduced informative content and lack of reference in the discourse of patients with Alzheimer's Type Dementia (DAT). Patients with DAT, fluent aphasics and normal controls were given a referential communication task structured to assess lexical encoding of information, pragmatic/conceptual elaboration of information and effectiveness in establishing reference. The subjects also received standardised aphasia tests (CADL, Holland, 1980; and Cookie Theft Picture Description, Nicholas and Brookshire, 1993).