Dermatomyostis

Occasionally, auto-immune diseases may emerge as paraneoplastic syndromes. This is especially recognized in the case of polymyositis/dermatomyostis, but it is an extremely rare event in systemic sclerosis (SSc). The authors report the case of a sixty-year-old woman who presented with Raynaud's phenomenon and rapidly progressing skin thickness of the forearms, hands and lower limbs. Patient evaluation revealed a colorectal carcinoma. The patient was referred to the oncology department. This concomitance of cancer and SSc with rapid progression of the latter, suggests that the scleroderma might have a paraneoplastic origin...

OBJECTIVE: To define potential factors that could predict concomitant neoplastic diseases in patients diagnosed with PM/DM, which could inform screening decisions. METHODS: Two researchers independently reviewed articles from Pubmed (MEDLINE), EMBASE, Cochrane Plus Library and ISI Web of Knowledge with no restrictions on study design or language. Given that some of the studies combined PM and DM patients as research subjects while others included only DM patients, data were subjected to meta-analyses for all combined PM/DM studies and studies that included only DM patients to obtain informative results...

Muscle biopsies from 8 children with dermatomysotis and from 4 normal children and 4 children and adults with other primary diseases of muscle were studied by ultrastructural techniques. The major abnormalities in dermatomyositis of childhood were in the walls of the intramuscular blood vessels, more specifically in the endothelial cells of capillaries, arterioles, and veins. Endothelial cells were observed in various stages of degeneration and regeneration. In a single plane of section, inclusions consisting of tubular aggregates were found within the cytoplasm of 76 to 98% of all intramuscular blood vessels...