Elevated Serum Levels of YKL-40, YKL-39, and SI-CLP in Patients with Treatment Failure to DMARDs in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis

Abstract

Around 30–60% of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) present treatment failure to conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (csDMARDs). Chitinase-like proteins (CLPs) (YKL-40, YKL-39, SI-CLP) might play a role, as they are associated with the inflammatory process. This study aimed to evaluate CLP utility as a biomarker in the treatment failure of csDMARDs. A case–control study included 175 RA patients classified into two groups based on therapeutic response according to DAS28-ESR: responders (DAS28 p p p = 0.011) and YKL-39 with SI-CLP (rho = 0.34, p p < 0.001. Non-responders were positive for all CLPs in 35.86%. Conclusions: CLPs could be considered as a useful biomarker to assess treatment failure, due to their association with clinical variables and improvement to the performance of regression models.

Keywords

• rheumatoid arthritis
• treatment failure
• chitinase-like proteins
• YKL-40
• YKL-39
• SI-CLP