COVID-19 in Spain

Karin Hellgren and colleagues examined pregnancy outcomes in relation to disease activity and antirheumatic treatment strategies in women with RA. This matched cohort study from Sweden and Denmark explored the associations between maternal RA and pre-term birth (PTB), or delivering babies small for gestational age (SGA)in relation to the mother's disease activity and use of antirheumatic treatment before and during pregnancy. Using national medical birth registers and rheumatology registers, the authors looked at1739pregnancies in women with RA, and 17,390 control pregnancies in the general population. Overall, women with RA had an increased likelihood of having pre-term and small babies. High ...

RA is an inflammatory autoimmune disease that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in the joints. It can also cause fatigue, and the underlying inflammation may affect other body systems. It is more common in women than in men. To date, active smoking has been the most reproducibly reported risk factor for a type of RA called anti-citrullinated protein antibody (ACPA) positive RA-particularly in people who carry the HLA-DRB1-shared epitope alleles. Nguyen and colleagues set out to investigate the relationship between passive smoking and the risk of developing RA in a large prospective cohort of healthy French women. The E3N-EPIC (Etude Epidémiologique au prèsdes femmes de la Mutuelle générale de l'Education ...

At the 2021 EULAR congress, Brkic and colleagues presented data from people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA)treated at Norwegian rheumatology outpatient clinics between 2010 and 2019. The project BioRheuma (BIOlogic treatment of patients suffering from inflammatory RHEUMAtic disorders in Norway) aimed to monitor people receiving b/tsDMARDs. Anonymized data files from10 participating centres were merged and analyzed over a 10-year period to show the annual total b/tsDMARD cost, as well as the mean cost per patient for all current users, for all those who started treatment, and for initiating patients naïve to b/tsDMARDs. The cost was calculated based on price offers given at the annual tender process for the different years. The number of registered RA patients in the databases increased ...

Murat Torgutalp and colleagues investigated the longitudinal association between radiographic sacroiliitis progression and treatment with TNFi in patients with early axSpA in a long-term inception cohort. The results were shared in an oral session at the 2021 EULAR congress. Based on the availability of at least two sets of sacroiliac joint (SIJ radiographs), 166 people with non-radiographic axialspondyloarthritis (nr-axSpA), and135 with radiographic (r-axSpA), from the German Spondyloarthritis Inception Cohort (GESPIC) were included in the analysis. Two trained and calibrated ...

RA is an inflammatory autoimmune disease that causes pain, swelling and stiffness in the joints. It can also cause fatigue, and the underlying inflammation may affect other body systems. Dementia is a symptom of damage to the brain, which can be caused by a number of different diseases - for example, Alzeimer's. Symptoms include memory loss, difficulty concentrating, confusion, and mood changes. It is not known what causes all types of dementia, but it is it thought that some of the damage could be caused by other underlying diseases. Heart failure happens when ...

Uveitis occurs in up to 20% of children with JIA, although this varies depending on the specific type of JIA that each child has. Jens Klotsche and colleagues shared new data at the 2021 EULAR congress analysing the risk of uveitis events after discontinuing disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARD) in children with one of two JIA categories: extended oligoarthritis and rheumatoid factor (RF)-negative polyarthritis. The data for the analysis came from two ongoing biologic registers: the German Biologics in Pediatric Rheumatology (BiKeR) registry, and the Juvenile arthritis Methotrexate/Biologics long-term Observation (JuMBO) study. Adverse events and reports about uveitis events during treatment and after discontinuation of DMARDs were collected. ...

Fruit flies have found at least two solutions to the problem of sorting their sex chromosomes: a matter of life and death. Sex determination in animals often depends on the unequal segregation of specific chromosomes. Female cells generally possess two X chromosomes, while male cells contain one X and one Y chromosome. The latter, which is inherited from the male parent, has far fewer genes than the X. In the fruit fly Drosophila, male cells make up for the fact that they have only one X chromosome by boosting the level of expression of all of its genes by a factor of 2. This phenomenon, which is known as dosage compensation, requires that the X chromosome in males be regulated differently from all the others. A team of molecular biologists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) ...

Professor Konstantin Arutyunov of the HSE Tikhonov Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics (MIEM HSE), together with Chinese researchers, has developed a graphene-based mechanical resonator, in which coherent emission of sound energy quanta, or phonons, has been induced. Such devices, called phonon lasers, have wide potential for application in information processing, as well as classical and quantum sensing of materials. The study is published in the journal Optics Express. Using an analogy with photons, quanta of the electromagnetic spectrum, there are also particles of sound energy, phonons. In fact, these are artificially introduced objects in physics - quasi-particles, which correspond to vibrations ...

Geologic activity on Earth appears to follow a 27.5-million-year cycle, giving the planet a "pulse," according to a new study published in the journal Geoscience Frontiers. "Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time. But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random," said Michael Rampino, a geologist and professor in New York University's Department of Biology, as well as the study's lead author. Over the past five decades, researchers have proposed cycles ...

A new paper in Scientific Reports led by researchers at William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science challenges increased salinity and seawater temperatures as the established explanation for a decades-long increase in the prevalence and deadliness of a major oyster disease in the coastal waters of the mid-Atlantic. Dr. Ryan Carnegie, the paper's lead author, says "We present an entirely new lens through which we can view our last 35 years of oyster history in the Chesapeake Bay region. We now know the great intensification of Dermo disease in the 1980s wasn't simply due to drought. It was more fundamentally due to the emergence of a new and highly virulent form of Perkinsus marinus, the parasite that causes Dermo." In an unusual twist, the team's evidence ...