A number of patients with inflammatory arthritis due to inadequate clinical or laboratory data do not fulfill diagnostic criteria for a clinical disease categories. These patients with initial diagnosis of undifferentiated arthritis (UA) may remit or progress to a definite well- defined condition such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) or remain as UA with persistence of inflammatory arthritis. The m...

The concentration of kynurenine has been measured in the serum of patients with rheumatoid arthritis and in a control group. The mean serum concentration was 2.27 +/- 0.688 mug/ml for patients with rheumatoid arthritis and 2.95 +/- 0.825 mug/ml for the control group.KYNURENINE: creatinine clearance ratios were higher in the rheumatoid arthritis than in the control group. These data suggest that...

OBJECTIVE To determine and compare self-management methods used for osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis and to determine which methods patients consider most effective. METHODS Patients with osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis were questioned about self-management methods and asked to indicate the most effective ones. RESULTS Twenty-seven patients with osteoarthritis and 26 with rhe...

An increasing number of studies show that besides the inherited genetic architecture (that is, genomic DNA), various environmental factors significantly contribute to the etiology of rheumatoid arthritis. Epigenetic factors react to external stimuli and form bridges between the environment and the genetic information-harboring DNA. Epigenetic mechanisms are implicated in the final interpretatio...

Early diagnosis and treatment of rheumatoid arthritis are associated with improved outcomes but current diagnostic tools such as rheumatoid factor or anti-citrullinated protein antibodies have shown limited sensitivity. In this pilot study we set out to establish a panel of urinary biomarkers associated with rheumatoid arthritis using capillary electrophoresis coupled to mass spectrometry. We c...

BACKGROUND Early diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis allows prompt initiation of antirheumatic therapy, which is associated with improved outcome. The use of IgM rheumatoid factor, the most widely used serologic test in assisting the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, is limited by low specificity. An enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay test detecting antibodies to cyclic citrullinated peptide (CCP...

INTRODUCTION Felty's syndrome is an uncommon but severe extra-articular manifestation of rheumatoid arthritis. Felty's syndrome is characterized by the triad of rheumatoid arthritis, neutropenia, and splenomegaly. The lifetime risk of Felty's syndrome for a rheumatoid arthritis patient is less than 1% and there are only few case reports of Felty's syndrome with neutropenia preceded clinical evi...

Paraoxonase-1 (PON1) is a high-density lipoprotein-associated enzyme that exhibits antioxidant and antiatherogenic activities. We examined a possible association between T172A (L55M) and T(-107)C polymorphisms and rheumatoid arthritis. These polymorphisms were determined in 88 rheumatoid arthritis patients and 78 healthy subjects, using the tetra-amplification refractory mutation system-PCR met...