The relationship of systemic vascular lesions to clinical manifestations in systemic lupus erythematosus

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show under what clinical setting the patients with SLE have systemic vascular lesions. Thirty-four autopsied cases with SLE were used as subject materials of this study. SLE patients with thrombosis had myocarditis and convulsions significantly more than the patients with other histological vascular lesions. The causes of death for patients with vascular fibrinoid degeneration and thrombosis was mainly uremia; on the contrary, death of patients with vascular sclerosis was more often caused by infection. The patients with thrombosis and vascular sclerosis had Libman-Sacks endocarditis significantly more than the patients without the systemic vascular lesions. The patients with involvement of the mediumsized artery had a low female incidence, photosensitivity incidence and positive LE cell incidence, and the cause of death for these patients was cerebral vascular involvement more than the patients with small artery involvement and those without systemic vascular lesions. One patient with vascular sclerotic involvement of the me-dium-sized artery died of myocardial infarction. From the point of view of systemic vascular lesions in SLE, the prognosis of the patients with thrombosis and vascular involvement of medium-sized arteries was the most severe.