Clonal haematopoiesis and risk of incident rheumatoid arthritis: results from the UK biobank - PubMed
12 hours ago
- #UK Biobank
- #Clonal haematopoiesis
- #Rheumatoid arthritis
- Clonal haematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CH) involves somatic genetic mutations that give stem cells a selective advantage and is linked to increased inflammatory cytokine production, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and malignancy.
- The study investigated whether CH is associated with the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an inflammatory autoimmune disease, using data from the UK Biobank.
- The research included 186,577 unrelated individuals with baseline data, genome-wide genotyping, whole exome sequencing (WES) for CHIP, and linked general practice (GP) data to identify incident RA cases during follow-up.
- Participants with prevalent RA or those taking RA medications at baseline were excluded from the study.
- The study tested associations between variant allele fraction (VAF) >2% and >10% for the 8 most common CHIP mutations and incident RA, identified through billing code algorithms.
- Over a median follow-up of 7.1 years, 594 participants developed incident RA, with a median time to RA diagnosis of 3.9 years.
- Incident RA cases were slightly older at enrollment, more likely to be female, have a history of smoking, higher BMI, and prevalent CVD or hypercholesterolaemia at baseline.
- No significant difference was found in the presence of CHIP mutations at baseline between those who developed RA and those who did not (6.3% vs. 6.4% with any CHIP mutation at >2% VAF).
- Common CHIP mutations, including TET2, TP53, and SF3B1, were not associated with an increased risk of incident RA in the UK Biobank cohort.