Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH) is a severe clinical entity associated with high mortality in the adult population. HLH has been associated with infections, malignancy and autoimmune conditions such a...
Authors: Christina S. Thornton, Parham Minoo, Michelle Schneider and Aurore Fifi-Mah
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that causes joint inflammation. It affects around 400,000 people in the UK and 1 million adults in the USA. Given the appropriate treatment, many can have relative...
Authors: Fran Toye, Kate Seers and Karen Louise Barker
Biomarkers of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) disease activity typically measure inflammation or autoimmunity (e.g. CRP, RF). C1M and C3M, metabolites of type I and III collagen, are markers reflecting tissue metabo...
Authors: Anne C. Bay-Jensen, Adam Platt, Martin A. Jenkins, Michael E. Weinblatt, Inger Byrjalsen, Kishwar Musa, Mark C. Genovese and Morten A. Karsdal
Fibromyalgia is characterized by chronic generalized pain, fatigue, sleep disorders and other symptoms. Physical exercise is recommended as the first choice of non-pharmacological therapy. Thus, the aim of thi...
Authors: Katherinne Ferro Moura Franco, Yuri Rafael dos Santos Franco, Evany Maira Espírito Santo Salvador, Bruna Cristina Brajon do Nascimento, Gisela Cristiane Miyamoto and Cristina Maria Nunes Cabral
Tumour necrosis factor inhibitor (TNFi) therapy has been available for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients for several decades but data on the long-term risk of malignancy associated with its use is limited. Ou...
Authors: Margaret P. Staples, Lyn March, Catherine Hill, Marissa Lassere and Rachelle Buchbinder
Fibromyalgia (FM) is a complex, centralized pain condition that is often difficult to diagnose and treat. FM is considered to have a genetic background due to its familial aggregation and due to findings from ...
Autoimmune disorders are known to produce false positives in serological tests for infections. Aetiological association between infections and autoimmunity, increased susceptibility to infectious and autoimmun...
To investigate the incidence and the mortality-rates of systemic sclerosis (SSc), its primary causes of death, and the temporal trends in events in Denmark during the last decades.
Authors: Sheraz A. Butt, Jørgen L. Jeppesen, Christine Fuchs, Mette Mogensen, Merete Engelhart, Christian Torp-Pedersen, Gunnar H. Gislason, Søren Jacobsen and Charlotte Andersson
To understand the roles of serum exosomes in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), we comprehensively investigated the protein profiles of serum exosomes in patients with RA.
The pathogenesis of spondyloarthritis (SpA) involves both inflammation and new bone formation in the spine. In line with this, the disease has been characterized as both inflammatory and fibrotic. The current ...
Authors: Julie Stougaard, Søren Lomholt, Pernille Ommen, Jens Kelsen and Tue W. Kragstrup
There is increasing interest in the identification of people at risk of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) to monitor the emergence of early symptoms (and thus allow early therapy), offer lifestyle advice to reduce the...
Authors: Gwenda Simons, Rebecca J Stack, Michaela Stoffer-Marx, Matthias Englbrecht, Erika Mosor, Christopher D Buckley, Kanta Kumar, Mats Hansson, Axel Hueber, Tanja Stamm, Marie Falahee and Karim Raza
We report the case of a patient with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) treated with tofacitinib who developed severe Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia (PJP) with an atypical clinical presentation.
Authors: Ian F. J. Pirker, Jacqueline Krane-Nuber, Werner C. Albrich, Rüdiger Müller and Thomas Neumann
Although treat-to-target has revolutionised the outcomes of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) there is emerging evidence that attaining the target of remission is insufficient to normalise patients’ qual...
Authors: I. C. Scott, A. Machin, C. D. Mallen and S. L. Hider
Osteoarthritis (OA) is diagnosed and managed primarily by general practitioners (GPs). OA guidelines recommend using clinical criteria, without x-ray, for diagnosis, and advising strengthening exercise, aerobi...
Authors: Thorlene Egerton, Rachel K Nelligan, Jenny Setchell, Lou Atkins and Kim L Bennell
Resveratrol is a natural polyphenol found in berries, roots and wine that is well known to have anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative properties. The anti-inflammatory effect has been reported for both immune c...
Authors: S. Lomholt, A. Mellemkjaer, M. B. Iversen, S. B. Pedersen and T. W. Kragstrup
Fibromyalgia is a debilitating condition, characterized by extensive muscular pain and fatigue. Vitamin D is essential for overall health, with ubiquitous involvement in various inflammatory and pain pathways....
Authors: Shawn D. Ellis, Sam T. Kelly, Jonathan H. Shurlock and Alastair L. N. Hepburn
To evaluate demographics, family history, and previous medication use at enrollment in a subset of psoriasis patients with self-reported psoriatic arthritis (PsA) enrolled in Psoriasis Longitudinal Assessment ...
Authors: Arthur Kavanaugh, Kim Papp, Alice B. Gottlieb, Elke M. G. J. de Jong, Soumya D. Chakravarty, Shelly Kafka, Wayne Langholff, Kamyar Farahi, Bhaskar Srivastava and Jose U. Scher
Vitamin D has been implicated as being involved in the aetio-pathogenesis of several autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Previous studies present contradictory results. Vitamin D binding p...
Authors: Mikael Brink, Linda Johansson, Evelina Nygren, Lisbeth Ärlestig, Johan Hultdin and Solbritt Rantapää-Dahlqvist
Chronic inflammatory arthritis is associated with increased cardiovascular (CV) morbidity and mortality. Pharmacological management and healthy lifestyle modification is recommended to manage these risks, but ...
Authors: Premarani Sinnathurai, Alexandra Capon, Rachelle Buchbinder, Vibhasha Chand, Lyndall Henderson, Marissa Lassere and Lyn March
Anti-cytokine therapies such as adalimumab, tocilizumab, and the small molecule JAK inhibitor tofacitinib have proven that cytokines and their subsequent downstream signaling processes are important in the pat...
Authors: Julie M. Parmentier, Jeff Voss, Candace Graff, Annette Schwartz, Maria Argiriadi, Michael Friedman, Heidi S. Camp, Robert J. Padley, Jonathan S. George, Deborah Hyland, Matthew Rosebraugh, Neil Wishart, Lisa Olson and Andrew J. Long
Although psoriatic arthritis is complex and involves multiple domains, recent advances in treatments have made remission or near-remission of most symptoms a potentially achievable goal for many patients. We s...
Authors: Laura C. Coates, Ana-Maria Orbai, Akimichi Morita, Olivier Benichou, Lisa Kerr, David H. Adams, Catherine L. Shuler, Julie Birt and Philip S. Helliwell
Autoimmune rheumatic diseases (ARDs) such as inflammatory arthritis and Lupus, and many of the treatments for these diseases, can have a detrimental impact on fertility and pregnancy outcomes. Disease activity...
Authors: Rhiannon Phillips, Bethan Pell, Aimee Grant, Daniel Bowen, Julia Sanders, Ann Taylor, Adrian Edwards, Ernest Choy and Denitza Williams
Takayasu arteritis is a rare large vessel vasculitis which predominantly affects young Asian females. Aortic regurgitation and heart failure are well described manifestations which are usually preceded by cons...
Authors: Nipun Lakshitha de Silva, Milinda Withana, Praveen Weeratunga, Prakash Priyadharshana and Inoshi Atukorala
There is growing evidence that it may be possible to identify people at high risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Assuming that effective interventions were available, this could mean that treatments ...
Authors: Sarah Munro, Luke Spooner, Katherine Milbers, Marie Hudson, Cheryl Koehn and Mark Harrison
Behcet’s disease and Sjogren’s syndrome is an autoimmune disorder from which many systems of the body can suffer. Here we reported a patient with a history of Behcet’s disease and Sjogren’s syndrome in which R...
Authors: Fulong Xiao, Jun Zhang, Waner Wang, Xuehua Wang, Wei Zhang, Liyue Xu and Fang Han
Clinical response and remission are defined in multiple ways and measured with different instruments, resulting in substantial variation of the proportion of patients classified as being in remission. Therefor...
Authors: Samina A. Turk, Linda A. Rasch, Dirkjan van Schaardenburg, Willem F. Lems, Marjolein Sanberg, Lilian H. D. van Tuyl and Marieke M. ter Wee
Patients with metabolic syndrome (MetS) are at increased risk of asymptomatic hyperuricemia (i.e., elevated serum uric acid (SUA) level without gout) and cardiovascular disease. We conducted a cross-sectional ...
Authors: Seoyoung C. Kim, Marcelo F. Di Carli, Rajesh K. Garg, Kathleen Vanni, Penny Wang, Alyssa Wohlfahrt, Zhi Yu, Fengxin Lu, Anarosa Campos, Courtney F. Bibbo, Stacy Smith and Daniel H. Solomon
This study aimed to explore the beliefs of people with knee osteoarthritis (OA) about the disease, and how these beliefs had formed and what impact these beliefs had on activity participation, health behaviour...
Authors: Ben Darlow, Melanie Brown, Bronwyn Thompson, Ben Hudson, Rebecca Grainger, Eileen McKinlay and J. Haxby Abbott
This study analyzed visits for and factors associated with gout and gout medication treatment trends for the years 2007–2011 in the United States given the introduction of febuxostat, the first new treatment o...
Authors: Kristen E. Castro, Kaitlyn D. Corey, Diana L. Raymond, Michael R. Jiroutek and Melissa A. Holland
Systemic Sclerosis is a multifactorial autoimmune rheumatic disease characterized by inflammation, fibrosis, immune dysregulation and vascular dysfunction.
Authors: Annemarie Schorpion, Max Shenin, Robin Neubauer and Chris T. Derk
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is markedly increased in patients with rheumatoid arthritis partly due to accelerated atherosclerosis from chronic inflammation. Traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as hyp...
Pneumococcal vaccination is recommended to patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS). However, little is known whether the diseases influence pneumococcal vaccine response. T...
Authors: Per Nived, Tore Saxne, Pierre Geborek, Thomas Mandl, Lillemor Skattum and Meliha C. Kapetanovic
Chronic pain, regional or widespread, is a frequent and multidimensional symptom in arthritis. There is still limited information on chronic pain in spondyloarthritis, which is important to recognize for adequ...
Authors: Elisabeth Mogard, Ann Bremander, Elisabet Lindqvist and Stefan Bergman
Pharmacotherapy is paramount to the management of systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases (SARDs), yet there is sub-optimal adherence and limited adherence interventions. To understand how to better support pat...
Authors: Hans Haag, Tim Liang, J. Antonio Avina-Zubieta and Mary A. De Vera
DAS28 is interpreted as the inflammatory disease activity of RA. Non-inflammatory pain mechanisms can confound assessment. We aimed to examine the use of DAS28 components or DAS28-derived measures that have be...
Authors: Daniel F. McWilliams, Patrick D. W. Kiely, Adam Young, Nalinie Joharatnam, Deborah Wilson and David A. Walsh
Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune inflammatory disease which involves the loss of self-tolerance with hyperactivation of autoreactive T- and B-cells. Protein tyrosine phosphatase non-receptor...
Authors: Adel M. Al-Awadhi, Mohammad Z. Haider, Jalaja Sukumaran and Sowmya Balakrishnan
Methotrexate (MTX) is well known to affect folic acid metabolism, so MTX treatment can result in alterations of mean corpuscular volume (MCV), which may impact on red cell distribution width (RDW), as MCV leve...
Authors: Julia Held, Birgit Mosheimer-Feistritzer, Johann Gruber, Erich Mur and Günter Weiss
Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is the most common rheumatic disease in children. Children with JIA are at risk of intraocular inflammation (uveitis). In the initial stages of mild-moderate inflammation uv...
Authors: Athimalaipet V. Ramanan, Andrew D. Dick, Ashley P. Jones, Catherine Guly, Ben Hardwick, Helen Hickey, Richard Lee, Andrew McKay and Michael W. Beresford
An important source of knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes about illness is the mass media. Research has established the often negative and emotive language utilised by journalists to report on physical and ment...
Authors: Andrew Mark Bassett, Savia de Souza, Ruth Williams and Heidi Lempp
Multiple targeted immunomodulators (TIMs) for psoriatic arthritis (PsA) treatment are available, but limited studies have directly compared these agents. This study indirectly compared the efficacy of TNF-α, i...
Authors: Vibeke Strand, M. Elaine Husni, Keith A. Betts, Yan Song, Rakesh Singh, Jenny Griffith, Marci Beppu, Jing Zhao and Arijit Ganguli
Total hip (THA) and total knee arthroplasty (TKA) are widely used, successful procedures for symptomatic end stage arthritis of the hips or knees, but patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), systemic lupus er...
Early and intensive targeted treatment with disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) has been shown to lead to substantial reductions in disease activity and radiograph damage in patients with early rhe...
Authors: Laura M. M. Steunebrink, Letty G. A. Versteeg, Harald E. Vonkeman, Peter M. ten Klooster, Monique Hoekstra and Mart A. F. J. van de Laar
To examine the frequency of possible giant cell arteritis (GCA) symptoms (including headache, temporal/scalp tenderness, jaw claudication and visual symptoms) in newly diagnosed polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) pa...
Authors: William Masson, Sara Muller, Rebecca Whittle, James Prior, Toby Helliwell, Christian Mallen and Samantha L. Hider
Being physically active is an essential component of successful self-management for people with inflammatory arthritis; however, the vast majority of patients are inactive. This study aims to determine whether...
Authors: Linda C. Li, Lynne M. Feehan, Chris Shaw, Hui Xie, Eric C. Sayre, Antonio Aviña-Zubeita, Navi Grewal, Anne F. Townsend, Diane Gromala, Greg Noonan and Catherine L. Backman
To determine the prevalence of depression among Japanese people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and explore the relationships between depression and an array of variables.
Authors: Rosarin Sruamsiri, Yuko Kaneko and Jörg Mahlich
The idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM, myositis) are a heterogeneous group of chronic autoimmune disorders causing considerable physical and mental health impact. There is a lack of formalised guidance d...
Authors: James B. Lilleker, Patrick Gordon, Janine A. Lamb, Heidi Lempp, Robert G. Cooper, Mark E. Roberts, Paula Jordan and Hector Chinoy
In recent years, the landscape of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines has rapidly expanded with the identification of new members proven to be involved at different extent in the pathogenesis of chronic immun...
Authors: Alessia Alunno, Francesco Carubbi, Roberto Giacomelli and Roberto Gerli
Giant cell arteritis (GCA) is the most common idiopathic systemic vasculitis in persons aged 50 years or greater. Treatment options for GCA, to-date, have been limited and have consisted primarily of glucocort...
Authors: Matthew J. Koster and Kenneth J. Warrington
This editorial accompanies the launch of BMC Rheumatology, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal within the BMC Series portfolio, which considers studies on all aspects of rheumatological diseases. The Journal...
Authors: James Mockridge, Alessia Alunno, Susan Goodman and Edward Roddy
