Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Rheumatoid arthritis in Poland and Lithuania: different clinical course and HLA associations despite similar genetic background
  1. R Płoski1,
  2. I Butrimiene2,
  3. E Kamińska3,
  4. K Valiukiene2,
  5. P Sliwińska3,
  6. E Kubasiewicz3,
  7. A Kozakiewicz3,
  8. A Smerdel4,
  9. V Kučinskas5,
  10. J Jaworski3,
  11. E Jastrzębska1,
  12. O Forre4,
  13. A Venalis2,
  14. J Pazdur3
  1. 1Human Molecular Genetics Laboratory, Department of Forensic Medicine and Department of Paediatric Diabetes and Birth Defects, Medical University, Warsaw, Poland
  2. 2Vilnius University, Institute of Experimental and Clinical Medicine, Vilnius, Lithuania
  3. 3Institute of Rheumatology, Warsaw, Poland
  4. 4Institute of Immunology and Centre for Rheumatic Diseases, Rikshospitalet University Hospital, Oslo, Norway
  5. 5Department of Human and Medical Genetics, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania
  1. Correspondence to:
    Dr R Płoski
    Human Molecular Genetics Laboratory, Department of Forensic Medicine and Department of Paediatric Diabetes and Birth Defects, Medical University, Warsaw, ul Oczki 1, 02-007 Warsaw, Poland; rploskiwp.pl

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

A recognised feature of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is its clinical heterogeneity, which may be caused by HLA factors. This theory is supported by observations that relatively severe and mild RA are associated with, respectively, DRB1*041 and DRB1*01.2–4 Further, comparisons between populations show that the disease course in the Mediterranean is milder than in northern Europe,5–8 correlating with a higher frequency of DRB1*01 and lower frequency of DRB1*04 in the former than in the latter region.6,7,9

METHODS AND RESULTS

Poland and Lithuania are neighbouring central European countries. During clinical practice we noted that RA was less severe in Lithuanian than in Polish patients. To test this observation we prospectively analysed 24 Polish and 20 Lithuanian randomly recruited patients with recent onset RA …

View Full Text