Macrophage activation syndrome in adult systemic lupus erythematosus: report of seven adult cases from a single Italian rheumatology center.

The aim was to describe the macrophage activation syndrome (MAS), a life-threatening syndrome characterized by excessive immune activation that can be triggered by conditions affecting immune homeostasis, in a cohort of adult Italian patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). This was a monocentric retrospective evaluation. The utility of the H-score, developed to estimate the individual risk of having reactive MAS in adult patients, was assessed. Among 511 patients with SLE, 7 cases (1.4%) of MAS (all females) were identified and their medical records reviewed. In all cases, MAS was simultaneous to the onset of SLE. All patients had fever, lymphadenopathy, hematological involvement, and high titer of anti-dsDNA antibodies. Workup for infections and malignancies was negative. In all cases, the H-score was higher than the cut-off suggested for the classification of reactive MAS. All cases required hospital admission, and 2 patients were admitted to the intensive care unit. Most patients were treated successfully with high doses of corticosteroids and with immunosuppressive drugs, whereas the full therapeutic regimen developed for primary hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis HLH was used only in one case. No death from MAS was observed. MAS is a rare and severe disorder that complicated the onset of SLE in our cohort. The H-score may be useful in the classification of these patients

Dynamics in online social networks

An increasing number of today's social interactions occurs using online social media as communication channels. Some online social networks have become extremely popular in the last decade. They differ among themselves in the character of the service they provide to online users. For instance, Facebook can be seen mainly as a platform for keeping in touch with close friends and relatives, Twitter is used to propagate and receive news, LinkedIn facilitates the maintenance of professional contacts, Flickr gathers amateurs and professionals of photography, etc. Albeit different, all these online platforms share an ingredient that pervades all their applications. There exists an underlying social network that allows their users to keep in touch with each other and helps to engage them in common activities or interactions leading to a better fulfillment of the service's purposes. This is the reason why these platforms share a good number of functionalities, e.g., personal communication channels, broadcasted status updates, easy one-step information sharing, news feeds exposing broadcasted content, etc. As a result, online social networks are an interesting field to study an online social behavior that seems to be generic among the different online services. Since at the bottom of these services lays a network of declared relations and the basic interactions in these platforms tend to be pairwise, a natural methodology for studying these systems is provided by network science. In this chapter we describe some of the results of research studies on the structure, dynamics and social activity in online social networks. We present them in the interdisciplinary context of network science, sociological studies and computer science.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, book chapte

Data for: Are there different vigilance strategies between types of social unit in Lama guanicoe?

Researcher of CONICET. Specific field: mammal behavior in desert areas, conservation and sustainable use of guanaco. And environmental education. Grupo de Investigaciones de la Biodiversidad (GIB) of IADIZA (Argentine Institute for Arid Land Research)-CONICET. From February 2010.Responsible professor, Physiology and Behavior of Vertebrates, in Exact and Natural Sciences Faculty of the Biology Degree, National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina. From August 2013

Data for: Are there different vigilance strategies between types of social unit in Lama guanicoe?

Researcher of CONICET. Specific field: mammal behavior in desert areas, conservation and sustainable use of guanaco. And environmental education. Grupo de Investigaciones de la Biodiversidad (GIB) of IADIZA (Argentine Institute for Arid Land Research)-CONICET. From February 2010.Responsible professor, Physiology and Behavior of Vertebrates, in Exact and Natural Sciences Faculty of the Biology Degree, National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina. From August 2013.THIS DATASET IS ARCHIVED AT DANS/EASY, BUT NOT ACCESSIBLE HERE. TO VIEW A LIST OF FILES AND ACCESS THE FILES IN THIS DATASET CLICK ON THE DOI-LINK ABOV