Objectives. Chronic periaortitis (CP) is a rare disease with a potentially immune-mediated pathogenesis. The study aims to report the frequency and the clinical characteristics of peripheral inflammatory arthritis in a cohort of CP patients, and to review the literature regarding the association between arthritis and CP. Methods. Forty-nine consecutive CP patients were seen at our department be...

Undifferentiated spondyloarthropathy (USpa) may either represent a forme fruste of other spondyloarthropathies like reactive arthritis or be a different disease entity. To study the link between USpa and reactive arthritis, we studied the presence of IgA antibodies to Yersinia enterocolitica, Salmonella typhimurium, Shigella flexneri, Campylobacter jejuni and Chlamydia trachomatis in sera from ...

INTRODUCTION Undifferentiated arthritis (UA) has a variable disease course; 40 to 50% of UA patients remit spontaneously, while 30% develop rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Identifying the UA patients who will develop RA is essential to initiate early disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD) therapy. Although the presence of bone erosions at baseline is predictive for a severe destructive diseas...

OBJECTIVE Mycobacteria have been implicated in the pathogenesis of various forms of arthritis. The aim of this study was to examine the diagnostic potential of molecular biological techniques as well as to investigate the pathogenetic role of mycobacteria in chronic arthritis. PATIENTS AND METHODS DNA, extracted from synovial fluid and synovial tissue samples from patients with mycobacterial ...

INTRODUCTION Anti-carbamylated protein (anti-CarP) antibodies have been described in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and arthralgia patients at risk of developing RA. To what extent these autoantibodies are specific for RA is unknown. Therefore, we investigated the diagnostic performance of the presence of anti-CarP antibodies for RA in a setting of early arthritis. METHODS Anti-CarP antibodies wer...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether reactive arthritis (ReA) known to occur after a urogenital infection with Chlamydia trachomatis can also follow an infection with Chlamydia pneumoniae, a recently described species of Chlamydiae that is a common cause of respiratory tract infections. METHODS Specific antibodies (microimmunofluorescence test) and lymphocyte proliferation to C trachomatis and C pneu...

Background Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) involves a set of chronic arthritis onset in childhood. JIA can be splitted into 7 categories based on the classification International League Associations for Rheumatology (ILAR): systemic arthritis, oligoarthritis, rheumatoid factor (RF) negative polyarthritis, RF positive enthesitis related psoriatic undifferentiated arthritis. In addition to th...

OBJECTIVE Psoriasis of early onset (type I; age of onset <or=40 years) is associated with HLA-Cw*06 while the shared epitope (SE) is associated with rheumatoid arthritis susceptibility. Our aim was to investigate the role of HLA-Cw*06 and HLA-DRB1 genes (including SE) with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) susceptibility. METHODS In a case-control association study, HLA-Cw*06 phenotype frequencies we...