A 38-year-old woman with systemic lupus erythematosus had developed a cutaneous lesion of linear scleroderma on the forehead 4 years after the diagnosis of lupus erythematosus. This case of coexistence of the two diseases can be regarded as a clinical variant of the connective tissue disease-overlap syndrome.

Cutaneous hyperpigmentation may be caused by a number of diseases, such as Addison’s disease, scleroderma, haemochromatosis, Peutz-Jeghers syndrome, lichen planus, and adverse reactions to some medications such as oral contraceptives, cyclophosphamide, chloroquine, minocycline, bleomycin, ketoconazole and methyldopa (1). Hyperpigmentation of the tongue, face and body skin is a rare adverse effe...

Calcinosis is a well-recognized manifestation of systemic sclerosis. Paraspinal or intraspinal calcinosis is rare, with reports of calcinosis involving the cervical, thoracic and lumbar separately, but not together. We now report a case of limited cutaneous scleroderma with extensive paraspinal calcinosis of the cervical and lumbar spine.

Seromucoid levels in blood of 50 normal men and in 63 cases of cutaneous collagen diseases were studied. There was a marked rise in the seromucoid level in cases of systemic lupus erythematosus and also a significant rise in scleroderma. This rise in seromucoid level may be a reflection of the degenerative connective tissue.

It has been demonstrated that a high-angle annular dark-field (HAADF) STEM technique gives an image resolving atomic columns. Due to the diffusion of this technique and an improvement of its resolution, a practical procedure for image simulation becomes important for a quantitative interpretation of the HAADF image. In this report a new practical scheme for a STEM image simulation is developed ...

Editorial: In their introduction to the first issue of the relaunched Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice ( JALPP), Sarangi and Candlin (2010) give two readings to the conjunction of 'applied linguistics' and 'professional practice' in the title, signalling two complementary agendas in applied linguistics research. The first agenda is to extend the study of language and com...

OBJECTIVE To describe microvascular abnormalities by nailfold capillaroscopy in patients with primary Sjögren's syndrome (SS) with or without Raynaud's phenomenon (RP) and those with anticentromere antibodies (ACA). METHODS Forty patients with SS (14 without RP, 16 with RP, 10 with ACA), 20 patients with scleroderma (SSc) (10 with limited and 10 with diffuse disease) (disease control group) a...