Journal of

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Background and Aim: Pemphigus is one of the most common types of autoimmune blistering disease that requires systemic immunosuppressive therapy. Immunosuppressive therapy has improved the disease outcome in recent decades, but long-term use of them has side effects. Recently, it has been tried to evaluate immunosuppressive drugs with less side effects. One of them is mycophenolate mofetil. The aim of this study was to evaluate of therapeutic efficacy of this drug in the patients with refractory pemphigus vulgaris.
Methods: Three hundred files of patients with pemphigus vulgaris were reviewed and among them 28 patients who had received mycophenolate mofetil due to resistance to treatment were entered to this study. The data were obtained from patients’ files and were analyzed using Kendall's tau-c correlation, Mann-Whitney and ANOVA tests.
Results: Male to female ratio was 1.8:1 with an average age of 43.3±13.6 year. Twenty-eight cases of pemphigus vulgaris were treated receiving 2gr/day mycophenolate mofetil + 1mg/kg/day prednisolone. Remission occurred after 3 months. Seventeen patients (10 men and 7 women) had complete remission. There was no significant association between gender and treatment response (P=0.58). There was no significant association between mean age of treated patients and untreated patients with treatment response (P=0.77). Also, there was no significant association between severity of mucosal (P=0.80) and severity of skin involvement with treatment response (P=0.80). Ten patients who received mycophenolate mofetil more than 12 months had treatment response to mycophenolate mofetil and they did not have any relapse in the follow up period.
Conclusion: Mycophenolate mofetil is effective and safe as an adjuvant therapy in patients with pemphigus vulgaris especially in refractory pemphigus. Initiation of the therapeutic effect is slow.

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Background and Aim: The use of leech extract in the preparation of cosmetic supplements and medicinal compounds has always been of interest. So far, the effect of this extract on the volume of the skin's epidermal tissue has not been scientifically confirmed, and no research has been done regarding the comparison of the effects of different types of base oils in this extract.
 

Methods: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of leech extract in the bases of olive oil, castor oil and bitter almond oil on the facial skin using the basic geometric morphometry software. For this purpose, 25 people from the age group of 45 to 55 years were selected. In order to compare morphological changes for forty days at a specific hour, pictures were taken using a digital camera. 12 landmark points were placed on the two-dimensional images using TpsDig2 software. The shape data obtained after superimposition analysis were analyzed using Procrust analysis with multivariate PCA and CVA statistical methods and cluster analysis (CV).
 

Results: The results showed that there is a significant difference between leech extract in volumizing and removing wrinkles with olive oil base (P>0.001), but the two groups of castor oil and bitter almond oil did not have a significant difference (P>0.001).
 

Conclusion: Leech extract has no effect on removing wrinkles and does not cause local swelling in the epidermal tissue in the time frame of the present study.