Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 University of Anbar - College of Science

2 Health and medical technology college, Foundation of technical education

3 Ministry Of Health

Abstract

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease characterized by the presence of autoantibodies like rheumatoid factor (RF). In the last few years, several other autoantibodies have been described of which anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide (CCP) antibody is the most specific. Chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) has extrahepaticautoimmune properties and a variety of autoantibodies were found in patients with HCV. This study is conductedto evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of Anti-CCP in compare with RF in RA patients and assess their association with severity of the disease and evaluate if HCV have beenone of the infectious agent for rheumatoid arthritis.Sixty blood samples were collected from RA patients and twenty from both apparently healthy group and HCV patients. The serum from each subject was tested for anti- CCP, RF and anti HCV by enzyme- linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Estimation of erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) by Westergreen' method was included in this study. The result indicated that anti-CCP postivity for RA patients sera (78.3%), (20%) for HCV patients and (0.0%) for healthy group, it showed highly significant differences in RA group in compare with control group (P<0.005).While the percentage of RF positive was (70%) for patients with rheumatoid arthritis with significant differences and 20% for patients with viral hepatitis type (c) with no significant differences in compare with control group (5%). Results also showed that (1.7%) of patients with rheumatoid arthritis showed positive result to HCV.

Keywords

Main Subjects

  1. Frequency of rheumatoid factor among RA cases was (70%) while anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide was (78.33 %). The sensitivity of CCP and specificity were higher than that of RF which made this test (anti-CCP) considered as a good parameter for diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis.
  2. The increase in RF and CCP means associate with the increase of ESR lead to suggest that anti-CCP is a prognostic indicator for RA progression, although generally not more useful than RF.
  3. There were 20% of HCV patients who had anti-CCP positive and there were 1.7% of RA patients were infected with HCV, which may lead to the suggestion that HCV may be one of the causative agents of RA or it may trigger the progression of RA.

 

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