Objective: To assess the safety and efficacy of rituximab in systemic sclerosis (SSc) in clinical practice. Methods: We performed a prospective study including patients with SSc from the European Scleroderma Trials and Research (EUSTAR) network treated with rituximab and matched with untreated patients with SSc. The main outcomes measures were adverse events, skin fibrosis improvement, lung fibros

Fler arter än någonsin i mänsklighetens historia hotas av utrotning och den biologiska mångfalden lokalt har förändrats kraftigt i en stor del av världens ekosystem. Grundläggande förändringar behövs både i samhället och för individer, för att bromsa den negativa trenden, skriver en rad debattörer.

Denna rapport utgör redovisning av ett arbete som LUCRAM (Lunds universitets centrum för riskanalys och riskhantering) har genomfört på uppdrag av Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap (MSB). Uppdraget heter ”Studie om föreskrifters inverkan på kommuners risk- och sårbarhetsanalyser avseende jämförbarhet och enhetlighet”. Inom detta uppdrag har LUCRAM genomfört en dokumentstudie av kommunala

International media regularly portray North Korea as abnormal, run by a leadership depicted in turns as evil, incompetent, all-powerful, and farcical. Such representations provide reason for publics not to question American-led preferences, dominant until 2018, for sanctions and threats over dialogue when responding to weapons development. How does a region beyond the Asia-Pacific, home to potenti

The social-democratic-inspired “Nordic model”, with its agenda for gender equality, has been an important example for the development of political interventions to transform society but at the same time, it has functioned as an emerging gender normalising and stabilising structure. In the last decade it has also become the focus of antigender movements and ethno-nationalistic parties both as emble

Land degradation in drylands has been investigated extensively over recent decades and several remote sensing based techniques attempt to decouple the human influence from the natural climate variability, but are contested in literature. We introduce a novel approach termed SeRGS-TREND that is designed to monitor land degradation by suppressing the impact from climate variability and highlight veg

The ongoing ESA funded'SMOS + Vegetation' project combines a retrieval component that aims at further improving the SMOS VOD product with an assimilation component that aims at demonstrating the added value of this product in constraining simulated land surface fluxes of carbon dioxide. This contribution focuses on the project's modelling and assimilation component. We describe the construction of

Late Permian mass extinction (LPME) research has focused primarily on Tethyan sections because it is believed that these successions are more complete than those from other localities, and provide a more comprehensive record of the largest, most devastating extinction event in Earth history. The Kisejin section, a previously undocumented mid-Tethyan, Upper Permian-Lower Triassic succession located

Sedimentary deposits of the Lower Cretaceous Xiagou Formation form the most significant potential hydrocarbon reservoirs in the Qingxi Sag, Jiuquan Basin (NW China). Zircon U-Pb ages of the dated basalts at the top of the Xiagou Formation give an isochron age of 115.6 Ma, and the sedimentation interval of the Xiagou Formation was speculated to range from about 125/124 Ma to 115 Ma based on paleon

The Valley of Lakes is approximately a 500-km elongate depression in Central Mongolia, where Eocene to Miocene continental sediments are long known for their outstanding fossil richness. The palaeontological record of this region is an exceptional witness for the evolution of mammalian communities during the Cenozoic global cooling and regional aridification. In order to precisely elucidate the cl

Central Asia is a key area to study the impact of Cenozoic climate cooling on continental ecosystems. One of the best places to search for rather continuous paleontological records is the Valley of Lakes in Mongolia with its outstandingly fossil-rich Oligocene and Miocene terrestrial sediments. Here, we investigate the response by mammal communities during the early stage of Earth's icehouse clima

The Triassic in the “Médianes rigides” Nappe of the Swiss Prealps, belonging to the Briançonnais realm of the Western Alps, consists of a several hundred meters thick carbonate succession. At the localities Wiriehorn and Rothorn, 650 m above sequence base, the Costatoria goldfussi limestone, a remarkable coquina and widespread transgressive marker bed, yields the key conodont Sephardiella truempyi

Conodonts are a clade of chordates and are valuable indicator fossils for biostratigraphy. The segminiplanate (neogondolelliform) conodonts represent a major morphological group ranging from upper Carboniferous to Upper Triassic marine sediments. However, the morphological similarity of segminiplanate P 1 elements generates problems for taxonomy, especially in the Permian and Triassic clades. Thi

The end-Permian mass extinction, ∼252 million years ago, is notable for a complex recovery period of ∼5 Myr. Widespread euxinic (anoxic and sulfidic) oceanic conditions have been proposed as both extinction mechanism and explanation for the protracted recovery period, yet the vertical distribution of anoxia in the water column and its temporal dynamics through this time period are poorly constrain

Radionuclide therapy is the use of radioactive drugs for internal radiotherapy, mainly for the treatment of metastatic disease. As opposed to systemic cancer therapies in general, the use of radioactively labeled drugs results not only in a targeted therapy but also the possibility of imaging the distribution of the drug during therapy. From such images, the absorbed doses delivered to tumors and

The taxonomy, diversity, evolutionary lineages, and stratigraphical distributions of Middle and early Late Triassic conodonts are reviewed and re-evaluated. Twenty-five genera are recognized in the Middle and early Late Triassic, including a new genus cited in open nomenclature. Of these, 24 genera are assigned to two families and seven subfamilies. The family Gondolellidae consists of the subfami

We present new data on the structure and age of the upper Permian strata in the basin of the Setorym River (tributary of the Vostochnaya Khandyga River) in the South Verkhoyansk region, represented by the Imtachan Formation and the lower part of the Nekuchan Formation. Based on the new findings of bivalve fossils from the Intomodesma costatum Zone, as well as on the study of carbon isotopes in the