OBJECTIVE Lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lp-PLA2), a marker of vascular inflammation, is associated with cardiovascular disease. This prospective study of an inception cohort aimed to investigate whether the level of Lp-PLA2 is associated with subclinical atherosclerosis in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS Patients from northern Sweden diagnosed with early RA were co...

BACKGROUND To analyse the relationship between subjective pain score and other measures of clinical, radiographic and functional status; in particular Larsen radiographic scores and Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ); in patients with severe rheumatoid arthritis (RA) with a disease duration of less than 3 years. METHODS In this cross sectional study of 105 patients with RA (76 women, 29 me...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the influence of HLA-DRB1 alleles encoding the QK/RRAA shared epitope (SE) on radiological outcome in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and to determine whether it is modulated by alleles carrying the putative rheumatoid arthritis-protective (RAP) sequence DERAA. Patients and methods. The association between erosive damage and HLA-DRB1 status was examined in 315 RA patients w...

INTRODUCTION The disease activity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis has improved during the past decade. The availability of new drugs and also a better assessment of the disease have been proposed to be responsible for this improvement. In the present work we estimate the effect of these factors on disease activity and function in patients with rheumatoid arthritis at the beginning of the ...

Sílvia Barros, Eduardo Gallego, Alfredo Lorente, Isabel F. Gonçalves, Pedro Vaz, Héctor René Vega-Carrillo and Maria Zankl IST/CTN, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Estrada Nacional 10, ao km 139,7 2695-066 Bobadela LRS, Portugal; Departamento de Ingeniería Nuclear, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, E-28006, Madrid, España; Unidad Académica de Estudios Nucleares de la Universidad Autónoma de Za...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate HLA-DM alleles as markers for disease severity in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS Two distinct cohorts of patients with RA were oligotyped for HLA-DB1 and HLA-DM genes using PCR amplified genomic DNA with sequence specific oligonucleotide probes. Cohort 1 comprised 199 unselected patients with RA (mean (SD) age 45.5 (13.5) years; disease duration 11.9(8.8) years), who...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether polymorphism in the transforming growth factor beta1 (TGFbeta1) gene is associated with disease outcome in rheumatoid arthritis. METHODS 208 patients with established rheumatoid arthritis were genotyped for the TGFbeta1 T869C polymorphism using an amplification refractory mutation system-polymerase chain reaction (ARMS-PCR) method. Disease severity was assesse...

OBJECTIVES Prolactin (PRL) is a hormone with cytokine-like activities that has been demonstrated to be involved in immune responses. However, there are inconsistent results related to the role of PRL in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the levels of PRL in serum and synovial fluid in patients with RA and osteoarthritis (OA) and examine whether PRL migh...

This paper presents and discusses data on vowel devoicing in English from Ph.D. research being carried out under Sarah Hawkins at Cambridge, and more recently with Klaus Kohler at the Institut für Phonetik und digitale Sprachverarbeitung in Kiel; and data on vowel deletion in German from the Kiel Corpus of Spontaneous Speech (IPDS 1995, 1996) reported most recently by Pétur Helgason and Klaus K...