Diagnostic role of elisa detected antibodies to citrullinated antigens in rheumatoid arthritis patients : a comparative study

Abstract EN

Objective : to investigate rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for the diagnostic role of anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibody (anti-CCP) and antifilaggrin antibody (AFA) in comparison with RF and matrix metalloproteinase-3 (MMP-3).

Methodology : A total of 60 RA patients and 50 other rheumatic disease patients were included in the study.

We used a second generation enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit for the detection of anti-CCP.

We constructed recombinant human flagging, which was citrullinated in vitro with human peptidylarginine deaminize, and subsequently used it as the coating antigen for AFA-ELISA.

Results : The specificities of anti-CCP (87.3 %) and AFA (93.5 %) were superior to those of RF (80.4 %) and MMP-3 (50.1 %).

The sensitivity of anti-CCP (86.3 %) was superior to all others.

However, the sensitivity of AFA (66.9 %) was inferior to those of RF (68.5 %) and MMP-3 (72.6 %).

Conclusion : ELISA detection of antibodies to citrullinated antigens, especially a second generation anti-CCP, showed higher discriminative ability than other assays, including RF, and would be useful to aid in the diagnosis of RA in clinical practice.