Has A Breakthrough Been Made In Early Arthritis Detection?

A genetic breakthrough into the underlying causes of arthritis could produce a simple blood test to predict if your wellbeing is at risk to developing the crippling disease. This is according to experts at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the United States, who found that arthritis develops because certain genes and the ‘tags’ that regulate them conspire together.

The team managed to find the vital specific DNA sequences that arthritis needs to progress by separating the tags caused by the disease from those that help cause it. They hope that the knowledge of these sequences can help to identify whose wellness will be affected by arthritis, as well as other non-infectious conditions such as Type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

According to Dr Andrew Feinberg, professor of molecular medicine at Johns Hopkins` Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, ‘Since rheumatoid arthritis is a disease in which the body`s immune system turns on itself, current treatments often involve suppressing the entire immune system, which can have serious side effects. The results of this study may allow clinicians to directly target the culpable genes and/or their tags.’

During their research, the investigators found that in arthritis sufferers, 10 DNA sites were tagged differently and affected their risk for developing the disease. Though nine of these were in a region known to play an important role in autoimmune diseases, a gene never before associated with the disease provided the tenth DNA site. According to lead researcher Dr Yun Liu, ‘Our method allows us to predict which tagging sites are most important in the development of a disease.’

Though several DNA mutations increase your risk for rheumatoid arthritis, additional factors seem to suppress or enhance that risk, one of which being the chemical tags that attach to DNA sequences. These tags are part of an epigenetic system that helps regulate when and how DNA sequences are ‘read’, which means how DNA sequences are used to create proteins and how they affect disease progression.

In their study of over 300 people with and without arthritis, the researchers catalogued DNA sequences and their tagging patterns, identifying DNA sequences that were more prevalent in patients with the disease. According to Tomas Ekstrom, professor of molecular cell biology at Karolinska Institute`s Department of Clinical Neuroscience, ‘This could explain why risk genes assert themselves and cause disease and why some people are affected more easily than others.’