Matteo Longo

Hyperlipidaemic state and cardiovascular risk in primary biliary cirrhosis.

Background: Primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), a chronic cholestatic liver disease, is frequently associated with severe hypercholesterolaemia but the clinical significance of this finding is unclear. Aims: To characterise changes in serum lipid profile over time and to assess the risk of cardiovascular disease in PBC. Subjects and methods: We studied a cohort of 400 PBC patients for 6.2 years (range 4 months to 24 years) by serial determinations of serum lipid levels and registration of all cardiovascular events. Subjects included in an Italian prospective population based study served as controls. Results: At presentation, 76% of patients had serum cholesterol levels >5.2 mmol/l. Hyperbilirubinaemic patients had higher total cholesterol and lower high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels (p<0.001). With time, disease progression was associated with a reduction in total (p<0.001) and HDL (p<0.05) cholesterol. The incidence of cardiovascular events was similar to that of the general population (cerebrovascular events: standardised ratio 1.4; 95% confidence interval 0.5–3.7; coronary events: 2.2; 0.9–4.3). Hypertension was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular events (3.8; 1.6–8.9). Association with moderate hypercholesterolaemia was of borderline significance (3.8; 0.9–17) whereas severe hypercholesterolaemia was not associated with increased risk (2.4, 0.5–11). Conclusions: In PBC, serum cholesterol levels markedly increase with worsening of cholestasis, and decrease in the late disease stages, despite a severe reduction in biliary secretion. Marked hypercholesterolaemia, typical of severe longstanding cholestasis, is not associated with an excess risk of cardiovascular disease while less advanced patients with moderate hypercholesterolaemia are exposed to an increased cardiovascular risk. Putative protective factors in PBC patients with severe hypercholesterolaemia should be assessed.

On rigid analytic uniformizations of Jacobians of Shimura curves

The main goal of this article is to give an explicit rigid analytic uniformization of the maximal toric quotient of the Jacobian of a Shimura curve over

Anticyclotomic Iwasawa’s Main Conjecture for Hilbert modular forms

\Bbb{Q}

The Saito–Kurokawa lifting and Darmon points

at a prime dividing exactly the level. This result can be viewed as complementary to the classical theorem of \v{C}erednik and Drinfeld which provides rigid analytic uniformizations at primes dividing the discriminant. As a corollary, we offer a proof of a conjecture formulated by M. Greenberg in his paper on Stark-Heegner points and quaternionic Shimura curves, thus making Greenbergs construction of local points on elliptic curves over

A note on control theorems for quaternionic hida families of modular forms

\Bbb{Q}

Λ-adic modular symbols over totally real fields

unconditional.

Plus/minus Heegner points and Iwasawa theory of elliptic curves at supersingular primes

LetF=Q be a totally real extension andf an Hilbert modular cusp form of level n, with trivial central character and parallel weight 2, which is an eigenform for the action of the Hecke algebra. Fix a prime }j n of F of residual characteristic p. Let K=F be a quadratic totally imaginary extension and K}1 be the }-anticyclotomic Zp-extension of K. The main result of this paper, generalizing the analogous result (5) of Bertolini and Darmon, states that, under suitable arithmetic assumptions and some technical restrictions, the characteristic power series of the Pontryagin dual of the Selmer group attached to.f;K}1/ divides thep-adicL-function attached to .f;K}1/, thus proving one direction of the Anticyclotomic Main Conjecture for Hilbert modular forms. Arithmetic applications are given.

Galois structure on integral valued polynomials

Let

Exceptional zero formulae for anticyclotomic p-adic L-functions of elliptic curves in the ramified case

E_{/_\mathbb{Q }}