Systemic sclerosis: demographic, clinical, and serologic features and survival in 1,012 Italian patients

Demographic and clinical features of 1,012 Italianpatients evaluated at the beginning and at the end offollow-up (mean, 7.1 yr 5.7 SD) are shown in Table3. At the last evaluation, 636 (62.8%) patients werealive, 279 (27.6%) were known to have died, and 97(9.6%) were considered lost to follow-up. These lattershowed the same clinico-serologic characteristics ofthe 915 patients evaluated for survival study. The female/male ratio rose from 7.8 of the entire SSc populationat first visit to 10.4 of the surviving 636 patients.At the time of diagnosis lcSSc was the most frequentcutaneous subset; its rather high prevalence was significantlymore pronounced at the end of follow-up(p .01). Similarly, the prevalence of various clinicalfeatures referring to both living and deceased patients(n 915) significantly increased, with the exceptionof Raynaud, calcinosis, and renal involvement; onlyarthritis was less frequently observed.