You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 71, Issue 4
  • Further genomic testing and histological examinations confirm the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis in an Italian mummy from the 16th century

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Letters
Further genomic testing and histological examinations confirm the diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis in an Italian mummy from the 16th century
  1. Gabriella Fontecchio1,
  2. Luca Ventura2,
  3. Anna Maria Poma1
  1. 1Dipartimento di Biologia di Base ed Applicata, Università di L’Aquila, L’Aquila, Italia
  2. 2U.O.C. di Anatomia ed Istologia Patologica, Ospedale S. Salvatore, L’Aquila, Italia
  1. Correspondence toAnna M Poma, Dipartimento di Biologia di Base e Applicata, Università di L’Aquila, Via Vetoio 1 I-67100, L’Aquila, Italia; annamaria.poma{at}univaq.it

https://doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2011-200966

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.

    We wish to reconsider the case of a 50–55-year-old female mummy, living in the 16th century, exhumed in San Francesco Church, Arezzo (Northern Italy) and renamed ‘Braids Lady’.1 Her body, after paleopathological examinations, revealed numerous signs of rheumatoid arthritis (RA).2 However, some authors propose ankylosing spondylitis (AS), suggesting that RA originated among native Americans and that this disease was absent in Europe before the discovery of America (1492 AD).3 RA and AS are human leucocyte antigen (HLA)-linked autoimmume rheumatic diseases (ARDs) but their manifestations are associated with different susceptibility genes: specific HLA-DRB1alleles for RA and HLA-B27 for AS.4 5 We reinforced these pathological data through genotyping tests, demonstrating that the mummy bore the HLA-DRB1*0101 allele, which, along with DRB1*0401 and DRB1*0404, is one of the main genes …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.