You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 82, Issue 6
  • Response to: ‘Correspondence on ‘Onset of rheumatoid arthritis after COVID-19: coincidence or connected?’’ by Roongta et al

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Correspondence response
Response to: ‘Correspondence on ‘Onset of rheumatoid arthritis after COVID-19: coincidence or connected?’’ by Roongta et al
  1. Veerle F A M Derksen,
  2. Diane van der Woude
  1. Department of Rheumatology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands
  1. Correspondence to Veerle F A M Derksen, Department of Rheumatology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden 2300 RC, The Netherlands; v.f.a.m.derksen{at}lumc.nl

https://doi.org/10.1136/annrheumdis-2021-220516

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 thank Roongta et al 1 for the interest taken in our work and for bringing this interesting case of seropositive rheumatoid arthritis (RA) after COVID-19 to the attention. They describe a patient who developed polyarthritis after proven SARS-CoV-2 infection, with seroconversion for both rheumatoid factor (RF) and anti-citrullinated protein antibodies (ACPA) between 2 weeks and 6 months after infection. This raises the question whether seroconversion (becoming seropositive for ACPA and RF) might occur more often after COVID-19.

    In our study, three out of five patients presenting with polyarthritis post-COVID were already autoantibody positive at first presentation to the rheumatologist, on average 8.3 weeks after COVID-19.2 Unfortunately, there was no serum available from the time before COVID-19 or from timepoints between SARS-CoV-2 infection and presentation to the rheumatologist, precluding any investigation into seroconversion after COVID-19 in these patients. However, detailed investigations into the characteristics of their ACPA response revealed the presence of multiple ACPA isotypes and …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Handling editor Josef S Smolen

    • Contributors VFAMD drafted the manuscript and DvdW revised it critically.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles