Lisa GM van Baarsen, Carina L Bos, Tineke CTM van der Pouw Kraan and Cornelis L Verweij
Arthritis Research & Therapy – Latest articles
Rheumatic diseases represent a diverse group of disorders. Most of these diseases are heterogeneous in nature, and show varying responsiveness to treatment. Since our understanding of the molecular complexity is incomplete and criteria for categorisation are limited, we mainly refer to these diseases as group averages. A powerful way to gain insight into the molecular complexity of these diseases has arisen from DNA microarray technology, which allows an open-ended survey to identify comprehensively the genes and biological pathways that are associated with clinically defined conditions. During the last decade encouraging results have been generated towards the molecular description of complex rheumatic diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA), systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), Sjogren syndrome (SS) and systemic sclerosis (SSc). Here, we describe developments in genomics research of the last decade that contributed to our insight into the pathogenesis, and the identification of biomarkers for diagnosis, patients stratification and prognosis.