Nailfold Capillaroscopic Pattern Changes and Its Correlation with Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) in Systemic Sclerosis (SSc) Patients.

SSc is a connective tissue disease characterized by early microvascular damage and dysfunction and immune system activation, as well as progressive fibrosis in the skin and internal organs.

Nailfold videocapillaroscopy (NVC) is the validated technique to assess SSc microvascular damage and is useful for the early diagnosis and follow-up of SSc micro- angiopathy.

Several studies have demonstrated correlations between microvascular damage extent and the severity of internal organ involvement, showing that NVC abnormalities correlate with disease activity and severity and may be also predictive for disease worsening. Furthermore, successful treatments have been shown to reduce NVC abnormalities in SSc cases, and these findings support the importance of NVC in monitoring SSc patients and also suggest its possible role as an outcome measure for microangiopathy in clinical trials.

Three different NVC patterns of microvascular damage have been described ("early" , "active" , "late" ).