We would like to thank Michael Mahler for his letter, ‘Population-based screening for anticitrullinated protein antibodies (ACPA): A step in the pathway to the prevention of rheumatoid arthritis?’ In his letter, Dr Mahler makes a plea to analyse and define reliable biomarkers to identify subjects who are on the trajectory to develop rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We agree with this notion of Dr Mah...

Many epidemiological studies involve analysis of clusters of diseases to infer locations of environmental hazards that could be responsible for the disease. This approach is however only suitable for sedentary populations or diseases with small latency periods. For migratory populations and diseases with long latency periods, people may change their residential location between time of exposure...

OBJECTIVE To assess the prevalence of overweight and obesity in a large cohort of patients with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) in comparison with the general population. To explore the relationship of body mass index (BMI) with clinical outcome in axSpA. METHODS Patients from the Groningen Leeuwarden Axial SpA cohort who visited the outpatient clinic in 2011/2012 were included in this cross-...

Abstract