“If you don’t have appropriate insurance then you won’t be eligible for this study,” Dr. Moreland said, “but we’re basically going to measure what’s happening in the real world.”
I would like a very simple test that every radiologist could take to their office and when they met an RA patient for the first time they could say, ‘Here’s what your lifetime risk of developing interstitial lung disease is.’
Markers for Cardiovascular Risk in RA
Patients with RA are at a higher risk for cardiovascular events, but it is difficult to tell which individuals in this group are at greatest risk.
Framingham scores are not very useful because they don’t perform well in women or younger individuals, the groups most affected by RA. Joan Bathon, MD, chief of the division of rheumatology at Columbia University in New York City, is searching for biomarkers that might gauge risk better.
Dr. Bathon, who received ACR funding in 2010, has amassed data from 600 RA patients in whom atherosclerosis has been measured; she will soon start the systematic process of identifying protein markers that hopefully will identify high-risk patients. She and her team have been refining assays, but she expects the first data to be generated by the end of the year.
“Can we say in the blood of these 600 people that there are biomarkers that identify that subset that has really severe atherosclerosis?” she said. “And if we can identify those, then maybe we can take that biomarker into a bigger population where they’re actually having heart attacks and see if it performs as a predictor.”
The REF funds groundbreaking research resulting in better care and treatment for more than 50 million Americans affected by rheumatic diseases. As the largest private funding source of rheumatology research and training programs in the U.S., the REF has awarded over $50 million to more than 1,000 recipients in the past five years. For more information about the REF and the Within Our Reach campaign, visit www.rheumatology.org/REF.
Thomas Collins is a freelance medical writer based in Florida.
