Anti-CCP Antibody Detection Facilitates Early Diagnosis and Prognosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a common systemic autoimmune disease with a prevalence of about 1% worldwide [1]. The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criteria for the classification of RA [2] are not very well suited to diagnose RA at an early stage of the disease [3, 4], because these criteria rely heavily on the expression of clinical symptoms of RA. In early RA these clinical parameters are often not (yet) manifest. Therefore, a specific and sensitive (serological) marker, which is present very early in the disease, is needed. A good marker should ideally not only indicate the development of the disease, but also be able to predict its erosive or non-erosive progression. The serological parameter that meets these requirements for a good and useful marker for early RA is the anti-citrullinated protein antibody. The sensitivity of this antibody is comparable to that of the rheumatoid factor (RF) (approximately 80%), but its specificity is much higher, about 98%. Several assays have been developed to detect this class of autoantibodies, which are termed anti-CCP because the most sensitive test is based upon cyclic citrullinated peptides. This review will discuss the potential of this autoantibody system for the diagnosis and prognosis of RA.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: