Is pentraxin 3 level an effective biomarker in disease activity in patients with rheumatoid arthritis?

Abstract

The aim of the current study was to identify whether serum pentraxin 3 (PTX3) level could be a marker of increased inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients. Material and methods: The study included 41 patients diagnosed with RA according to the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) 1990 diagnostic criteria. We compared the serum PTX3 levels between RA patients and a healthy control group, the relationship between PTX3 level and disease activity was also examined. Results: A statistically significant difference was determined between the RA patients and controls as regards PTX3, platelets, C-reactive protein, and mean platelet volume results (p = 0.042, p = 0.007, p = 0.017, p < 0.001, respectively). There was no statistically significant difference in terms of PTX3 level between anti-CCP-positive and-negative patients (p = 0.368). No statistically significant difference was determined in respect of PTX3 levels between RA patients with different disease activity scores (p = 0.346). Conclusions: No relationship was determined between PTX3 and disease activity in RA patients, nor with traditional clinical and biochemical measurements of disease activity. However, the PTX3 levels of the RA patients were found to be high in comparison with the control group. Because, from these results, the role of PTX3 in the pathogenesis of RA cannot be ignored, there is a need for further studies to determine the potential role of PTX3 in RA pathogenesis.

Circulating and Synovial Pentraxin-3 (PTX3) Expression Levels Correlate With Rheumatoid Arthritis Severity and Tissue Infiltration Independently of Conventional Treatments Response

“…Here, for the first time, we analyzed PTX3 expression profiles in a cohort of early and treatment-naïve RA patients at baseline, and 6-months after cs-DMARD treatment. As previously described, we confirmed that RA patients presented a higher concentration of circulating PTX3 compared to healthy donors (13)(14)(15) and that PTX3 levels positively correlated with CRP (16). In addition, we showed that, at the onset of the disease prior to any treatment modification, circulating PTX3 levels also correlated with ESR, DAS28 and the count of swollen and tender joints, therefore being a strong marker of disease activity.…”

“…In the context of RA, PTX3 has been shown to be constitutively highly expressed by synovial fibroblasts (12); however, as described in other tissues, various resident or infiltrating synovial cells like macrophages or endothelial cells might also represent a source of PTX3 upon inflammatory activation. Several groups found that PTX3 is upregulated in the serum of RA patients compared to healthy donors (13)(14)(15) or patients with osteoarthritis (16). However, conflicting results have been published regarding the relationship between the level of PTX3 in the serum and clinical features of the disease.…”

“…However, conflicting results have been published regarding the relationship between the level of PTX3 in the serum and clinical features of the disease. On the one hand, studies on different cohorts of 111 (17), 29 (18), 60 (13), 83 (19), 58 (14) or 41 (15) RA patients reported no relationship between PTX3 and the Disease Activity Score (DAS)-28. Conversely, other groups found an association between PTX3 serum levels and either CRP (16) or the progression of joint damage assessed by increase in the total van der Heijde modified Sharp score (SHSS) and joint space narrowing over 3 years (20).…”

Exploring the role of monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 in fibroblast-like synovial cells in rheumatoid arthritis

“…The expression level of CRP is elevated and regarded as a biomarker in RA (Atzeni et al, 2017;Wasserman, 2018). In RA, the level of PTX3 has been found to be higher than that in the control group (Balbaloglu & Ozcan, 2020). As compared traditional biomarkers, PTX3 has been found to be a sensitive non-invasive biomarker of clinical arthritis activity in RA (Sharma et al, 2018), indicating that ER, CRP and PTX3 may play a significant role in improving arthritis.…”

The polymorphism of rs2227513 can affect the expression of IL-22 and the proliferation of FLS, which leads to the progress of rheumatoid arthritis

“…However, despite all these symptoms, the presence of IA is the hallmark of clinical diagnosis of RA. The diagnosis criteria is compromised as a series of joint examination and imaging, testing of RA-related autoantibodies, systemic inflammation, and the duration of joint symptoms [1,4].…”