Abstract
Early diagnosis is critical to improve outcomes in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but current diagnostic tools have limited sensitivity. Here we report a large-scale multicenter study involving training and validation cohorts of 3,262 participants. We show that serum levels of soluble scavenger receptor-A (sSR-A) are increased in patients with RA and correlate positively with clinical and immunological features of the disease. This discriminatory capacity of sSR-A is clinically valuable and complements the diagnosis for early stage and seronegative RA. sSR-A also has 15.97% prevalence in undifferentiated arthritis patients. Furthermore, administration of SR-A accelerates the onset of experimental arthritis in mice, whereas inhibition of SR-A ameliorates the disease pathogenesis. Together, these data identify sSR-A as a potential biomarker in diagnosis of RA, and targeting SR-A might be a therapeutic strategy.
Highlights
Diagnosis is critical to improve outcomes in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but current diagnostic tools have limited sensitivity
We first assessed the levels of soluble scavenger receptor-A (sSR-A) in patients with RA or other types of rheumatic diseases and non-autoimmune inflammatory diseases
Elevation of sSR-A was previously reported in patients with hepatitis[23,24], the levels of sSR-A in RA patients were much higher compared to those in patients with autoimmune hepatitis (AIH, Fig. 1b)
Summary
Diagnosis is critical to improve outcomes in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), but current diagnostic tools have limited sensitivity. We show that serum levels of soluble scavenger receptor-A (sSR-A) are increased in patients with RA and correlate positively with clinical and immunological features of the disease This discriminatory capacity of sSR-A is clinically valuable and complements the diagnosis for early stage and seronegative RA. Administration of SR-A accelerates the onset of experimental arthritis in mice, whereas inhibition of SR-A ameliorates the disease pathogenesis Together, these data identify sSR-A as a potential biomarker in diagnosis of RA, and targeting SR-A might be a therapeutic strategy. We provide compelling evidence to show that increasing the levels of SR-A accelerates arthritis progression whereas inhibition of SR-A ameliorates disease severity These findings support diverse functions of SR-A under different pathological conditions, and might provide diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for clinical management of RA
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