Annals of internal medicine
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study
Treatment of primary Sjögren syndrome with rituximab: a randomized trial.
Primary Sjögren syndrome (pSS) is an autoimmune disorder characterized by ocular and oral dryness or systemic manifestations. ⋯ Rituximab did not alleviate symptoms or disease activity in patients with pSS at week 24, although it alleviated some symptoms at earlier time points.
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The functional and quality-of-life benefits of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) have not been established. ⋯ Transcatheter aortic valve replacement provides clinically important benefits in physical function and disease-specific measures of quality of life but modest benefits in psychological and general health measures. More comparative studies on functional status and quality of life are needed for informed treatment decision making.
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The choice of antiplatelet therapy after acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is complicated: Ticagrelor and prasugrel are novel alternatives to clopidogrel, patients with some genotypes may not respond to clopidogrel, and low-cost generic formulations of clopidogrel are available. ⋯ Genotype-guided personalization may improve the cost-effectiveness of prasugrel and ticagrelor after percutaneous coronary intervention for ACS, but ticagrelor for all patients may bean economically reasonable alternative in some settings.
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Encephalitozoon cuniculi, a microsporidial species most commonly recognized as a cause of renal, respiratory, and central nervous system infections in immunosuppressed patients, was identified as the cause of a temporally associated cluster of febrile illness among 3 solid organ transplant recipients from a common donor. ⋯ Microsporidiosis is now recognized as an emerging transplant-associated disease and should be considered in febrile transplant recipients when tests for routinely encountered agents are unrevealing. Donor-derived disease is critical to assess when multiple recipients from a common donor are ill.