OBJECTIVE To study the association between silica exposure, separately as well as combined with smoking, and the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA) with or without the presence of antibodies against citrullinated peptide antigens (ACPA). METHODS This Swedish population based case-control study analysed 577 incident RA cases and 659 randomly selected controls, all men aged 18-70 year...

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to examine seroconversion and the relationship with age and inflammation of autoantibodies in a large group of patients attending an outpatient rheumatology clinic. METHODS Levels of antibodies to citrullinated proteins/peptides (ACPAs) and IgM rheumatoid factor (IgM-RF) were determined in 22,427 samples collected from 18,658 patients. The diagnosis was ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate changes of rheumatoid factor (RF) and antibodies against citrullinated peptides (ACPA) during therapy with disease modifying antirheumatic drugs. METHODS We obtained clinical and serological data of patients from the treatment start and after 6 months of therapy. With non-parametric tests, we analysed changes of ACPA and RF levels between the two visits and the influe...

INTRODUCTION Anti-citrullinated peptides antibodies (ACPA) are present in 80% of sera of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients with high specificity for diagnosis and prediction for the development of early erosive arthritis. A few studies have reported a low frequency ACPA in systemic sclerosis (SSc) patients with the presence of arthritis. OBJECTIVE The aim of our study was to determine the fr...

OBJECTIVES This study investigated: (1) the association of physical workload (PW) and risk of rheumatoid arthritis (RA); (2) the potential interactions between PW and the genes in the human leucocyte antigen (HLA) region. METHODS A population-based case-control study involving incident cases of RA (3150 cases and 5130 controls) was performed using data from the Swedish Epidemiological Investi...

INTRODUCTION It is known that anticitrullinated peptide antibody (ACPA)-positive rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has a preclinical phase. Whether this phase is also present in ACPA-negative RA is unknown. To determine this, we studied ACPA-negative arthralgia patients who were considered prone to progress to RA for local subclinical inflammation observed on hand and foot magnetic resonance imaging (M...

BACKGROUND Hypertension is more common in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) than in the general population. It is unknown whether hypertension is due to RA-related medications or the disease itself. Therefore, we sought to investigate associations between RA-related autoantibodies, specifically antibodies to citrullinated protein antigens (ACPA) and systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diast...

The introduction of tests recognizing 'anti-citrullinated protein antibodies' (ACPA) has caused a revolution in rheumatology. Immunization against citrullinated proteins is a feature almost unique for rheumatoid arthritis, although ACPA may occur long before the onset of symptoms. Even if the presence of ACPA does not seem to reveal a distinct arthritis phenotype at symptom onset, it predicts a...