Martínez TG, Tórres RB, Sánchez RV, Martiatu HM, Rodríguez PC, Garay PHE

Language: English
References: 0
Page: 2501-2505
PDF size: 378.91 Kb.

ABSTRACT

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic and autoimmune inflammatory disease. The objective of this work was to develop Cuban immunoassays to determine antibodies and evaluate the usefulness of antibodies against a citrullinated fibrinogen peptide for diagnosis and therapeutic clinical assessment of patients with RA. A novel immunoassay to determine antibodies against a citrullinated fibrinogen peptide was designed by informatics prediction of B cell epitopes and synthetized by chemical synthesis. For evaluate the analytical and diagnostic performance a case-control study was conducted. Participants were 162 patients with RA, 112 patients with other diseases and 50 healthy individuals. Commercial rheumatoid factor antibodies, second generation citrullinated peptides, mutated citrullinated vimentin, carbamylated vimentin and antiqueratin were determined by commercial immunoassays. A longitudinal study was conducted with 60 patients with early RA. Antibodies, C-reactive protein, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, activity index and response to methotrexate at six months were determined. Diagnostic performance of the antibodies against the citrullinated fibrinogen peptide was superior to the most commonly used commercial immunoassays, with a lower cost per patient (5.52 USD) than the second generation antibodies (14.00 USD). Patients with these antibodies had a higher risk of a lower response to treatment (p = 0.0481). The determination of antibodies against a novel citrullinated fibrinogen peptide has lower cost and great utility for the diagnosis and therapeutic clinical evaluation in RA. This work granted the Annual Award of the National Academy of Sciences of Cuba for the year 2019.