OBJECTIVE To compare electromyographic (EMG), kinematic, kinetic, and ultrasound (US) features of pes plano valgus associated with US-confirmed tibialis posterior (TP) tenosynovitis in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and healthy control subjects. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, patients with RA and US-confirmed tenosynovitis of TP underwent gait analysis, including 3-dimensional kinematics, ...

An image plate (IP) detector coupled with high energy synchrotron radiation was used for atomic pair distribution function (PDF) analysis, with high probed momentum transfer Qmax ≤ 28.5 Å−1 from crystalline materials. Materials with different structural complexities were measured to test the validity of the quantitative data analysis. Experimental results are presented here for crystalline Ni, ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the correlation between neurological deficits indicative of compressive myelopathy and MRI findings in a series of patients with RA and symptomatic involvement of the cervical spine. METHODS Forty-one consecutive patients with RA were studied using cervical spine MRI. Unconditional logistic regression analysis was used to identify MRI parameters of cervical spine involve...

Redundancy analysis (RA) is a versatile technique used to predict multivariate criterion variables from multivariate predictor variables. The reduced-rank feature of RA captures redundant information in the criterion variables in a most parsimonious way. A ridge type of regularization was introduced in RA to deal with the multicollinearity problem among the predictor variables. The regularized ...

OBJECTIVE To examine how anti-citrullinated protein antibody (ACPA) epitope spreading takes place prior to the onset of clinical rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and to analyze the pattern of autoantigen reactivity at the beginning of the immune response. METHODS Multiple consecutive serum samples from 79 RA patients who had donated blood before disease onset were available for analysis. Fifty-thre...

BACKGROUND/AIMS To evaluate the impact on mortality of anti-tumor necrosis factor (anti-TNF) treatment of rheumatoid arthritis-associated interstitial lung disease (RA-ILD). METHODS We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 100 RA-ILD patients who visited our tertiary care medical center between 2004 and 2011, identified those treated with an anti-TNF agent, divided patients into non...

OBJECTIVE To determine immunohistological markers in synovial tissue of patients with early rheumatoid arthritis (RA) which are associated with unfavourable disease outcome. METHODS Synovial tissue was obtained from 36 patients with RA within 1 year after the initial symptoms and before starting disease modifying antirheumatic drug treatment. Clinical, laboratory, and radiological assessments...

Objectives-The assessment of allelic polymorphism of the T cell receptor gene segment, TCRBV2S1, in rheumatoid arthritis. Methods-A total of 136 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) (ACR criteria) and 150 controls were TCRBV2S1 genotyped using a nested PCR amplification strategy followed by single-strand conformation polymorphism (SSCP) analysis. Results-The SSCP typing method detected two p...

Epidemiological studies are inconsistent on the relationship between schizophrenia (SCZ) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Several studies have shown that SCZ has a protective effect on RA, with RA occurring less frequently in SCZ cases than would be expected by chance, whilst other studies have failed to replicate this. We sought to test the hypothesis that this effect is due to a protective effe...