SELE and systemic sclerosis: However, our major findings - that is, early SSc patients with SSc marker autoantibody have higher ICTP levels, regardless of the NVC pattern; and early SSc patients with an NVC scleroderma pattern have a higher prevalence of puffy fingers and higher circulating levels of E-selectin, regardless the autoantibody profile, the two features being closely related each other - did not differ significantly when we excluded these 10 patients from the analysis (see Additional files 1, 2, 3 and 4).