Biomarkers in biological fluids and their potential use as indicators of lupus nephritis in individuals with systemic lupus erythematous

Abstract

Lupus nephritis is one of the most severe manifestations of systemic lupus erythematous. Renal involvement in patients with systemic lupus erythematous is an important cause of morbidity and mortality. The pathogenesis of lupus nephritis involve multiple factors, wich include genetic predisposition, epigenetic regulation and environmental interaction. Conventional clinical parameters such as creatinine clearance, proteinuria, urinary sediments, antibodies anti-double-strand DNA and complement proteins they are not enough sensitive or specific to detect disease activity. In the last decades, “Omics” technologies (Proteomic, genomic, transcriptomic, metobolomic) have been used in an extensive way looking for biomarkers, which allowed to discovery variants associated with systemic lupus erythematous and lupus nephritis. Such findings have expanded our knowledge about molecular basis of disease and they have been very important to identification of potential therapeutic targets to prediction of disease and early treatment. In this review, we resume some of recent studies focused in identification of biomarkers associated with lupus nephritis in diverse biological fluids.

Keywords

• Lupus nephritis
• systemic lupus erythematous
• biomarkers