Dr Eder recaps her presentation from ACR Convergence 2023 on research relating high-sensitivity C reactive protein and the risk of developing psoriatic arthritis among patients with psoriasis.

Lihi Eder, MD, is an associate professor and rheumatologist at the University of Toronto.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello everyone, my name is Lihi Eder. I'm a rheumatologist and an associate professor from the University of Toronto in Canada, and I'll be talking about presenting a study that we've presented here at the ACR meeting that assessed the association between high-sensitivity CRP levels and future risk of developing psoriatic arthritis in patients with psoriasis.

The rationale behind doing this study was that we have an interest in identifying patients that are at high risk of developing psoriatic arthritis that we can maybe follow them up more closely and maybe even treating them early to prevent progression to psoriatic arthritis. So in this study we used a prospective cohort of psoriasis patients that have been followed over a period of about 15 years in Toronto. Patients enter this study if they have a diagnosis of psoriasis and they don't have psoriatic arthritis and have been assessed every year by a rheumatologist to see if they have converted to psoriatic arthritis.

So we used almost 600 patients that have been followed in this cohort and we used serum samples that were available to us. We measured high sensitivity CRP levels. There were 2 main findings. First, we found that HS-CRP was associated with some baseline characteristics, for example, patients that had arthralgia, patients that were obese, and female patients had higher levels of HS-CRP.

Secondly, we also found that higher levels of HS-CRP are associated with an increased risk of progression to psoriatic arthritis. These suggest that subclinical inflammation, as measured by high sensitivity CRP, may identify this subgroup of patients that are at high risk of progression and perhaps if we measure these levels or identify patients with high levels of HS-CRP, we should be following them up more closely so we can make a diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis earlier on and then start treatment early and maybe even preventing progression for this condition.