Our objective was to determine whether the presence of the human leukocyte antigen HLA-DRB1 locus is associated with production of anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies (anti-CCP Abs) and to what extent they are associated with increased susceptibility to and severity of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in Egyptian patients. Twenty-nine RA patients gave informed consent to participate in a case...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate a contribution of selected laboratory parameters for a prediction of progressive and erosive development in patients with early rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS In a prospective study baseline levels of antibodies to cyclic citrullinated peptide (anti-CCP), IgM, IgA, and IgG rheumatoid factors (RFs) were measured by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in 104 pati...

This paper investigates a probabilistic version of the concurrent constraint programming paradigm (CCP). The aim is to introduce the possibility to formulate so called \randomised algorithms" within the CCP framework. Our approach incorporates randomness directly within the (operational) semantics instead of referring to an \external" function or procedure call. We deene the operational semanti...

Concurrent constraint programming (ccp) is a mature formalism for reasoning about concurrent systems that exhibit a constrained behavior. Spatial ccp and epistemic ccp are two novel variants of ccp currently being developed by Knight and Valencia. These variants model systems with spatial hierarchies of group information and knowledge. These systems are ubiquitous due to the advent of social ne...

BACKGROUND The driving pressure gradient for cerebral perfusion is the difference between mean arterial pressure (MAP) and critical closing pressure (CCP = zero flow pressure). Therefore, determination of the difference between MAP and CCP should provide an appropriate monitoring of the effective cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP(eff)). Based on this concept, the authors compared conventional me...

We incorporate population effects of sex and antibodies directed against cyclic citrullinated peptides (anti-CCP) into the linkage analysis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) with microsatellites data provided by the North American Rheumatoid Arthritis Consortium in Genetic Analysis Workshop 15.The method stems from a generalized linear mixed model that incorporates the marginal population effects of...

UNLABELLED The primary objective of this study was to evaluate and compare the immunodiagnostic significance and utility of anti-RA33 with anti-CCP, RF, and CRP in Saudi patients with rheumatoid arthritis. METHODS This was a prospective controlled clinical study conducted at King Abdul Aziz University Tertiary Medical Centre. The sera of 41 RA patients, 31 non-RA patients, and 29 healthy cont...

Background: Rheumatoid Factor (RF) occurs in 7090% of patients with established rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibody (Anti-CCP) detection may be used to confirm the diagnosis of RA in patients with uncharacterized chronic inflammatory arthritis. This study is an attempt to evaluate the role of RF and anti-CCP in the diagnosis and prognosis of rheumatoid arthriti...

Submitted Chapter 3 74 ABSTRACT Background A substantial group of patients with severe personality disorders does not benefit from structured psychotherapy. For those patients we developed a Col-laborative Care program (CCP), managed by (community) mental health nurses. We aimed to investigate the feasibility and preliminary outcomes of this CCP for patients with severe borderline personality d...

INTRODUCTION Antibodies against cyclic citrullinated peptides (CCPs) are useful for diagnosing rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Antibodies to mutated citrullinated vimentin (MCV) were described recently in RA. The aims of this study were to evaluate the usefulness of anti-MCV for diagnosing RA in anti-CCP-negative patients and to monitor anti-MCV titres during infliximab therapy for RA. METHODS We ...