You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 82, Issue 2
  • Response to: ‘Correspondence on ‘Systemic sclerosis and the COVID-19 pandemic: World Scleroderma Foundation preliminary advice for patient management’’ by Snarskaya and Vasileva

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Correspondence response
Response to: ‘Correspondence on ‘Systemic sclerosis and the COVID-19 pandemic: World Scleroderma Foundation preliminary advice for patient management’’ by Snarskaya and Vasileva
  1. Cosimo Bruni1,
  2. Marco Matucci-Cerinic1,2
  1. 1 Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze, Italy
  2. 2 Department of Geriatric Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, Azienda Ospedaliero Universitaria Careggi, Firenze, Italy
  1. Correspondence to Dr Marco Matucci-Cerinic, Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Firenze 50121, Italy; marco.matuccicerinic{at}unifi.it

https://doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2020-219533

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    We read with great interest the response from Snarskaya and Vasileva.1 A second wave of SARS-CoV-2 infection is now a global reality2: since the publication of the World Scleroderma Foundation preliminary advice on the management on systemic sclerosis (SSc) patients during the first COVID-19 pandemic,3 growing evidence has accumulated on COVID-19 affected SSc patients.4 Up to 22 June, at the end of the first wave, 25 cases of SSc-COVID-19 were published in the literature, most of them undergoing immunosuppressant treatment with corticosteroids (CCS), conventional synthetic disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (csDMARDs) (methotrexate or mycophenolate mofetil) or biological DMARD (bDMARDs) (rituximab or tocilizumab) and with a variable outcome.4 This heterogeneity was a limitation in understanding the possible influence of ongoing immunosuppression and the effect of administered treatments. A recent meta-analysis, including 62 studies with more than 300 000 patients with autoimmune diseases, concluded that bDMARD monotherapy was a protective factor for COVID-19-related hospitalisation and death, in particular with antitumour necrosis factor alpha, while the use of CCS, conventional-synthetic DMARDS (csDMARD) and csDMARDs/bDMARD combination exposed the patients to a higher risk.5 A focused analysis on SSc population has described more SSc-COVID-19 cases: 1/64 patients in Crisafulli et al,6 1/168 patients in Bellan et al 7 and 2/526 patients in Del Papa et al,8 with one of them, previously exposed …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Handling editor Josef S Smolen

    • Correction notice This article has been corrected since it published Online First. The provenance and peer review statement has been included.

    • Contributors CB and MM-C conceived, drafted and revised the manuscript.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests MM-C reports grants and personal fees from Actelion, personal fees from Biogen, personal fees from Bayer, personal fees from Boehringer Ingelheim, personal fees from CSL Behring, personal fees from Eli-Lilly, outside the submitted work. CB reports personal fees from Actelion, personal fees from Eli Lilly, grants from Gruppo Italiano Lotta alla Sclerodermia (GILS), grants from New Horizon Fellowship, grants from European Scleroderma Trials and Research (EUSTAR), grants from Foundation for Research in Rheumatology (FOREUM), grants from Fondazione Italiana per la Ricerca sull’Artrite (FIRA), outside the submitted work.

    • Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles