Publications by authors named "Mihailova Snezhina"

The association of immunocompromised patients and severity of COVID-19 infection is not well established. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), primary immune deficiencies (PIDs) are among the conditions that can predispose to a more severe course of COVID-19. We report the clinical course and immunological evaluation of five patients with common variable immune deficiency (CVID) who have experienced SARS-CoV-2 virus.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Tremendous progress has been made in the recognition of primary immune deficiencies (PIDs) in Bulgaria since in 2005 we have joined the J Project Central-Eastern European collaborative program. Ten years later an Expert Centre (ExpC) for Rare Diseases - Primary Immune Deficiencies at the University Hospital "Alexandrovska"- Sofia was established. In May 2017 The National Register of Patients with Rare Diseases also became operational as a database containing clinical and genetic information for Bulgarian patients with PID.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Vasculitis can be a life-threatening complication associated with high mortality and morbidity among patients with primary immunodeficiencies (PIDs), including variants of severe and combined immunodeficiencies ((S)CID). Our understanding of vasculitis in partial defects in recombination activating gene (RAG) deficiency, a prototype of (S)CIDs, is limited with no published systematic evaluation of diagnostic and therapeutic modalities. In this report, we sought to establish the clinical, laboratory features, and treatment outcome of patients with vasculitis due to partial RAG deficiency.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Autoimmunity is becoming an increasingly recognized complication in patients with primary immunodeficiencies (PIDs), including a variety of combined immune deficiencies such as Recombination Activating Gene (RAG) defects. The approach to treating autoimmunity in PID patients is complex, requiring a balance between immunosuppression and susceptibility to infection. Inflammatory arthritis is a feature of immune dysregulation in many PIDs, and the optimal treatment may differ from first line therapies that usually consist of disease-modifying anti rheumatic drugs (DMARDs).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In the last decade it was found that functional polymorphisms in the promoter and/or coding regions of regulatory genes are likely to pre-determine the phenotype manifestation of a certain cytokine profile, and thus could be used as disease-associated markers. Having in mind the hypothesis of impaired cytokine regulation in depressive disorder, as well as the diverse population-dependent results for cytokine polymorphisms, we investigated the relation between the cytokine gene polymorphisms of key pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, TGF-β, IL-10, IL-6, IFN-γ) and susceptibility as well as clinical course of depression in Bulgarians. The study included 80 patients with depression (50 women and 30 men) and 50 healthy controls.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF