Two-year Results of an Open Pilot Study of a 2-treatment Course with Rituximab in Patients with Early Systemic Sclerosis with Diffuse Skin Involvement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To study safety and potential efficacy of a 2-treatment course (month 0/6) with rituximab (RTX) in early diffuse systemic sclerosis (dcSSc). METHODS: Two years' followup (open-label study) was done of 8 patients with early dcSSc. Patients received an infusion of 1000 mg RTX 2 times at months 0 and 6, with 100 mg methylprednisolone. Clinical measurements, Disease Activity Score, functional status, and CD19+ peripheral blood count were performed at months 0, 3, 6, 12, 15, 18, and 24 and histopathological evaluation of the skin at months 0, 3, 12, and 24. RESULTS: There was a clinically significant change in skin score, with a mean Modified Rodnan skin score of 24.8 at baseline (SD 3.4) and 13.6 at Month 24 [SD 5.6; mixed models analyses (MMA) p < 0.0001] and a significant decrease in Disease Activity Score (DAS), with a median of 4.5 at baseline (range 1.5-7.5) and 0.5 at Month 24 (range 0.0-5.5; MMA p < 0.0001). Indices of internal organ involvement remained stable throughout the study. RTX induced effective B cell depletion at baseline and Month 6 (< 5 CD19+ cells/μl blood). The blindly assessed hyalinized collagen score changed significantly over time (MMA p = 0.009), with a mean of 69.3 at baseline (SD 22.8) and 33.1 at 24 months (SD 27.0). Five serious adverse events were considered unrelated to the RTX treatment. CONCLUSION: A 2-treatment course (months 0/6) with RTX appears to be well tolerated and may have potential efficacy for skin disease and stabilization of internal organ status in early dcSSc. Clinical Trials Registration NCT00379431.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".