Autoimmunity Reviews

The therapeutic management of systemic lupus erythaematosus (SLE) is still a great debate. Despite the latest innovation agents or developing trials, there is not an integrated and common approach for treating SLE. For decades, natural and synthetic glucocorticoids (GCs) have been the first and most frequently used immune suppressive agents in SLE. Therefore, GCs are the most important therapy in SLE in daily routine, however the response to GCs differs widely and long-term therapy is associated with side-effects...

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Offspring of women with anti-SSA/Ro-SSB/La antibodies are believed to be at risk for congenital heart block (CHB). Whether this risk can be reduced, and what constitutes standard of care treatment is, however, unclear. The objective of this review therefore was to determine whether currently proposed standard of care treatments to avoid CHB in offspring of mothers at risk are evidence-based. To do so, we conducted a review of the literature under appropriate keywords and phrases in Medline/PubMed and Google Scholar for the years 2000-2013...

The "exposome" is a term recently used to describe all environmental factors, both exogenous and endogenous, which we are exposed to in a lifetime. It represents an important tool in the study of autoimmunity, complementing classical immunological research tools and cutting-edge genome wide association studies (GWAS). Recently, environmental wide association studies (EWAS) investigated the effect of environment in the development of diseases. Environmental triggers are largely subdivided into infectious and non-infectious agents...