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Objectives: Studies supporting therapeutic drug monitoring to biopharmaceuticals in SLE are scarce. We aimed to assess anti-drug antibody (ADA) occurrence in belimumab-treated SLE patients and associations between belimumab concentrations and clinical response, serological outcomes and adverse events. Methods. We included 100 patients treated with intravenous belimumab. Clinical data and biologica

Surface waters can contain a diverse range of organic pollutants, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals and industrial compounds. While bioassays have been used for water quality monitoring, there is limited knowledge regarding the effects of individual micropollutants and their relationship to the overall mixture effect in water samples. In this study, a battery of in vitro bioassays based on hum

Incomati river basin is located in the continent of South Africa and is shared between three countries of Republic of Mozambique, Republic of South Africa, and the Kingdom of Swaziland. Located in a water-stressed region and shared between three countries it has importance in both sociopolitical and water scarcity aspect. The three countries recently (in 2002) signed an agreement for letting certa

We present the CarbonTracker Europe High-Resolution (CTE-HR) system that estimates carbon dioxide (CO2) exchange over Europe at high resolution (0.1 × 0.2° ) and in near real time (about 2 months' latency). It includes a dynamic anthropogenic emission model, which uses easily available statistics on economic activity, energy use, and weather to generate anthropogenic emissions with dynamic time pr

Two large-scale randomized screening trials, the Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovary (PLCO) cancer trial in the USA and the European Randomized Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) trial in Europe are currently under way, aimed at assessing whether screening reduces prostate cancer mortality. Up to the end of 1998, 102,691 men have been randomized to the intervention arm and 115,322 to the contr

These European Resuscitation Council Ethics guidelines provide evidence-based recommendations for the ethical, routine practice of resuscitation and end-of-life care of adults and children. The guideline primarily focus on major ethical practice interventions (i.e. advance directives, advance care planning, and shared decision making), decision making regarding resuscitation, education, and resear

Iron centeredN-heterocyclic carbene (Fe-NHC) complexes have shown long-lived excited states with charge transfer character useful for light harvesting applications. Understanding the nature of the metal-ligand bond is of fundamental importance to rationally tailor the properties of transition metal complexes. The high-energy-resolution fluorescence detected X-ray absorption near edge structure (HE

An intronic variant in ANKRD55, rs6859219, is a genetic risk factor for multiple sclerosis, but the biological reasons underlying this association are unknown. We characterized the expression of ANKRD55 in human PBMCs and cell lines. Three ANKRD55 transcript variants (Ensembl isoforms 001, 005, and 007) could be detected in PBMCs and CD4(+) T cells but were virtually absent in CD8(+), CD14(+), CD1

Recently, we reported an association between a SNP in IL28RA and MS. Here, we performed a fine-mapping of the IL28RA locus by genotyping 10 haplotype-tagging SNPs in a Basque-Spanish population. In addition, based on shared genetic risk loci between autoimmune diseases, a psoriasis-associated SNP located at this locus, rs4649203, was genotyped in four independent populations, comprising a total of

Background & Aims: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has been associated with multiple metabolic abnormalities. By applying a non-targeted metabolomics approach, we aimed at investigating whether serum metabolite profile that associates with NAFLD would differ in its association with NAFLD-related metabolic risk factors. Methods & Results: A total of 233 subjects (mean ± SD: 48.3 ±

SAMHD1 is a deoxynucleoside triphosphate triphosphohydrolase (dNTPase) that restricts viral replication in infected cells and limits the sensitivity to cytarabine by hydrolysing its active metabolite, as recently shown in acute myeloid leukemia. Cytarabine is an essential component in the Nordic mantle cell lymphoma protocols (MCL2 and MCL3) for induction and high-dose chemotherapy treatment befor

The reduction in mortality following acute myocardial infarction (AMI) is an important achievement of modern medicine. Despite this progress, AMI remains the most common cause of heart failure (HF) and HF-related morbidity and mortality. The involvement of the innate immune response in different stages after AMI has attracted important attention in recent years. With the increasing range of potent

A setup capable of conducting gas pulse-X-ray probe ambient pressure photoelectron spectroscopy with high time resolution is presented. The setup makes use of a fast valve that creates gas pulses with an internal pressure in the mbar range and a rising edge of few hundreds of microseconds. A gated detector based on a fast camera is synchronized with the valve operation to measure X-ray photoemissi

In the past, the identification of myocardial fibrosis was only possible through invasive histologic assessment. Although endomyocardial biopsy remains the gold standard, recent advances in cardiac imaging techniques have enabled non-invasive tissue characterization of the myocardium, which has also provided valuable insights into specific disease processes. The diagnostic accuracy, incremental yi

The reduction of public expenditure and investments in health care provisioning calls for new, sustainable models to transform the increasing aging population and dementia-related diseases incidence from global challenges into new opportunities. In this context, Information and Communication Technologies play a vital role, to both promote aging in place and home management of Patients with Dementi

Background: Historically, endocrine therapy was used in a range of scenarios in patients with rising PSA, both as a treatment for locally advanced non-metastatic prostate cancer and PSA recurrence following curative intended therapy. In the present study the objective was to investigate if chemotherapy added to endocrine therapy could improve progression-free survival (PFS). Materials and Methods:

The IEEE 1687 standard describes reconfigurable structures allowing to flexibly access the instruments existing within devices (e.g., to support test, debug, calibration, etc.), by the use of configurable modules acting as controllable switches. The increasing adoption of this standard requires the availability of algorithms and tools to automate its usage. Since the resulting networks could inevi

Background: While the impact of knee pain and knee osteoarthritis (OA) on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) has been investigated in the literature, there is a lack of knowledge on the impact of different definitions of OA on HRQoL. The main aim of this study was to measure and compare the impact of knee OA and its different definitions on HRQoL in the general population. Methods: A random sa