BACKGROUND Rheumatoid arthritis is characterised by antibodies to citrullinated proteins (ACPA) and rheumatoid factor (RF) in the preclinical phase. OBJECTIVE To determine whether an intervention aimed at decreasing autoantibody levels in people at risk may be effective in preventing progression to arthritis. METHODS 83 patients with arthralgia positive for ACPA or IgM-RF were randomly allo...

Many environmental factors have been associated with an increased risk of developing Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), but so far smoking is the only environmental risk factor that has been extensively studied and widely accepted. Smoking is associated with an increased risk of developing seropositive RA (RF and/or ACPA). Recent studies show that tobacco smoking can influence disease phenotype, with t...

INTRODUCTION The diagnostic, predictive and prognostic role of anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (CCP) antibodies in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients is widely accepted. Moreover, detection of these antibodies in subjects presenting with undifferentiated arthritis (UA) is associated with a significant risk to develop the disease. On the other hand, clinical and prognostic significance of eval...

In rheumatoid arthritis (RA), immunological triggers at mucosal sites, such as the gut microbiota, may promote autoimmunity that affects joints. Here, we used discovery-based proteomics to detect HLA-DR-presented peptides in synovia or peripheral blood mononuclear cells and identified 2 autoantigens, N-acetylglucosamine-6-sulfatase (GNS) and filamin A (FLNA), as targets of T and B cell response...

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease of complex etiology. A characteristic feature of a subset of RA is the presence of anti-citrullinated protein antibodies (ACPA), which correlate with a progressive disease course. In this study, we employed streptavidin capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay to analyze ACPA reactivity. Using the pro-filaggrin peptide HQCHQEST-Cit-GRSRGRCGRSG...

INTRODUCTION A hallmark of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is the development of autoantibodies targeting proteins that contain citrulline. Anticitrullinated protein antibodies (ACPAs) are currently detected by the commercial cyclic citrullinated peptide (CCP) assay, which uses a mix of cyclised citrullinated peptides as an artificial mimic of the true antigen(s). To increase the sensitivity of ACPA ...

Anticyclic citrullinated protein antibody (ACPA) is known as an important indicator for diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Our aim was to examine the relationship between the serum ACPA titer at baseline and responsiveness to biological agents (antagonists of either tumor necrosis factor or interleukin 6) in patients with RA. ACPA was measured using second-generation chemiluminescent enzym...

A new anticyclic operad Mould is introduced, on spaces of functions in several variables. It is proved that the Dendriform operad is an anticyclic suboperad of this operad. Many operations on the free Mould algebra on one generator are introduced and studied. Under some restrictions, a forgetful map from moulds to formal vector fields is then defined. A connection to the theory of tilting modul...

Genetic association studies have been proved to be an efficient tool to reveal the aetiology of many human complex diseases and traits. When the phenotype is binary, the logistic regression model is commonly employed to evaluate the association strength of the genetic variants predispose to human diseases because the maximum likelihood estimator of the odds ratio based on case-control data is e...