Betamethasone valerate foam has shown to be an effective and well-tolerated treatment of mild-to-moderate AA. Further trials are warranted to evaluate the role of this new formulation in comparison or in combination with intralesional corticosterioids in AA treatment.

No abstract

A 56-year-old white woman presented with a 4-month history of chronic-recurrent bullous and necrotic lesions involving the distal phalanges of the second and third fi ngers of her left hand. The same fi ngers were also affected by numbness, paresthesia, pain with night exacerbation, as well as loss of sensitive discrimination. Treatment with topical antibiotics and corticosteroids as well as systemic ibuprofen and prednisone had not helped. She had no other diseases, did not smoke and denied any trauma at work and at home.On physical examination, she had sharply demarcated necrotic areas of the fi ngertips and fl attened bullae of the palmar surface of the second and third fi ngers of the left hand ( Figure 1). We preformed electromyography that confi rmed our diagnosis. Figure 1 Sharply demarcated necrotic areas of the fingertips and flattened bullae of the palmar surface of the second and third fingers of the left hand.

This study addresses the problem of efficient fault simulation and test generation in circuits using multi-output combinational logic cells. A symbolic fault simulation algorithm is proposed to exploit bit-level parallelism in order to represent the propagation of the output value of faulty cells throughout the circuit, thus accounting for different faulty behaviours in a single simulation step. A satisfiability (SAT)-based test generation procedure is also provided and it early discovers sets of undetectable behaviours. Results for a set of combinational benchmarks show the feasibility of the proposed approach

Introduction: Hypertension is a potent and modifiable risk factor for cardiocerebrovascular diseases, accounting for more than 50% of deaths for stroke and 25% of those for coronary heart diseases. Systolic blood pressure (SBP) increases continuously throughout adult life and the prevalence of isolated systolic hypertension (ISH) rises accordingly, reaching about 60% among those in their sixties and 75% in those aged 75 years and older. Objective: This study was planned to assess prognostic factors influencing the long-term maintenance of the blood pressure in elderly. A retrospective study was performed, studying 127 old patients (mean age 76,7 ± 7,1 years) with a diagnosis of uncontrolled essential hypertension, with an equal distribution between gender. The mean systolic blood pressure was 160 ± 14 mmHg, while the mean diastolic blood pressure was 82 ± 9 mmHg. It was thus prescribed an antihypertensive drug therapy to reach the systolic blood pressure value <140 mmHg and the diastolic blood pressure value < 85 mmHg, that was obtained in 78% of patients. The efficacy of the drug therapy was followed ever 3 months over a period up to 2 years. Results: Results indicated that the monotherapy was effective only in 22 patients (17,3%), while the most part of patients required a combined, multidrug therapy, that for the most cases included a diuretic associated with either a calcium-channel blocker or a drug acting on the renin-angiotensinaldosterone system (RAAS). The prognostic factors involved in the long-term maintenance of the blood pressure were evaluated by a discrete time survival model. The univariate analysis, using the Log-rank test, indicates that only the treatment with an ACE inhibitor drug positively correlated with a long-term efficacy of the antihypertensive therapy (p=0.019). The multivariate analysis unravelled that the presence of hypercholesterolaemia (observed in 46% of patients) was an important negative prognostic factor for the long-term efficacy of the therapy (RR:3.2 IC: 1.3-8.2, p=0.013). The multivariate analysis emphasised as well the role of the RAAS drugs in the treatment of hypertension, confirming that the use of an ACE inhibitor positively correlated with the long-term efficacy of the antihypertensive therapy (Relative Risk: 0.25, CI: 0.10-0.062, p=0.03) and indicating an important role for the sartans. Conclusions: Our data demonstrated indeed that, in hypercholesterolaemic patients, the prescription of a sartan drug allowed the long-term maintenance of the therapy (RR: 0.16 CI: 0.05-0.54, p=0.003), reducing of about 84% the relative risk of the loss of efficacy.