Demographic, clinical and antibody characteristics of patients with digital ulcers in systemic sclerosis: data from the DUO Registry

OBJECTIVES: The Digital Ulcers Outcome (DUO) Registry was designed to describe the clinical and antibody characteristics, disease course and outcomes of patients with digital ulcers associated with systemic sclerosis (SSc). METHODS: The DUO Registry is a European, prospective, multicentre, observational, registry of SSc patients with ongoing digital ulcer disease, irrespective of treatment regimen. Data collected included demographics, SSc duration, SSc subset, internal organ manifestations, autoantibodies, previous and ongoing interventions and complications related to digital ulcers. RESULTS: Up to 19 November 2010 a total of 2439 patients had enrolled into the registry. Most were classified as either limited cutaneous SSc (lcSSc; 52.2%) or diffuse cutaneous SSc (dcSSc; 36.9%). Digital ulcers developed earlier in patients with dcSSc compared with lcSSc. Almost all patients (95.7%) tested positive for antinuclear antibodies, 45.2% for anti-scleroderma-70 and 43.6% for anticentromere antibodies (ACA). The first digital ulcer in the anti-scleroderma-70-positive patient cohort occurred approximately 5 years earlier than the ACA-positive patient group. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides data from a large cohort of SSc patients with a history of digital ulcers. The early occurrence and high frequency of digital ulcer complications are especially seen in patients with dcSSc and/or anti-scleroderma-70 antibodies

Für Stalins deutsche Opfer ein Denkmal aus Moskau. Alexander Vatlin: „Was für ein Teufelspack“ Die Deutsche Operation des NKWD in Moskau und im Moskauer Gebiet 1936 bis 1941, Berlin: Metropol Verlag 2013

Alexander Vatlin: „Was für ein Teufelspack“ Die Deutsche Operation des NKWD in Moskau und im Moskauer Gebiet 1936 bis 1941, Berlin: Metropol Verlag 2013

Gestapo V-Leute kommunistischer Herkunft – auch ein Strukturproblem der KPD?

The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) – along its line of unconditional loyalty to the Soviet Party – already in the early 1920s established an undercover so-called AM-Apparat (antimilitarist apparatus). This included an intelligence service to investigate political antagonists and at the same time fight (police) spies, „traitors“ and agent provocateurs. In this field, for years an often bloody competition between Communists and Nazis took place. No kind of intelligence, in particular fighting (police) spies, was new to the KPD at the moment of Nazitakeover in January 1933. The KPD, however, was then confronted with coinciding of executive public power and political enmity. Some members of the KPD, including several operatives of the AM-Apparat, became renegades in the service of the Gestapo. A number of those Communists taken into preventive custody by the Gestapo, under heavy torture became secret agents of the Gestapo. These former comrades harmed effectively the illegal fight of the KPD during the Nazi regime. The author, under the impression of missing systematic research in this field, started a regional analysis in the Rhein/Ruhr area. It was based in particular on the stock of approx. 65.000 Gestapo files in the Düsseldorf State Archive. In his first comprehensive report he estimates the number of former Communist Gestapo-agents to approx. 300 in the Rhein/Ruhr area