Verweij C L
Department of Pathology and Rheumatology, VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Neth J Med. 2009 Dec;67(11):364-71.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA ) is a chronic inflammatory joint disease that is heterogeneous in nature. The heterogeneity is reflected by the variation in responsiveness to virtually any treatment modality. Since our understanding of the molecular complexity is incomplete and criteria for categorisation are limited, we mainly consider the disease RA as group average. A powerful way to gain insight into the complexity of RA has arisen from DNA microarray technology, which allows an open-ended survey to comprehensively identify the genes and biological pathways that are associated with clinically defined conditions. During the last decade encouraging results have been generated towards the molecular description of complex diseases in general. Here, I describe developments in genomics research that provide a framework to increase our understanding of the pathogenesis and the identification of biomarkers for early diagnosis, prognosis and stratification, aimed at a personal medicine approach in RA .
类风湿性关节炎（RA）是一种本质上具有异质性的慢性炎症性关节疾病。这种异质性体现在对几乎任何治疗方式的反应差异上。由于我们对分子复杂性的理解不完整且分类标准有限，我们主要将类风湿性关节炎视为群体平均值。DNA微阵列技术为深入了解类风湿性关节炎的复杂性提供了一种有力方法，该技术允许进行开放式调查，以全面识别与临床定义病症相关的基因和生物途径。在过去十年中，总体而言，在复杂疾病的分子描述方面取得了令人鼓舞的成果。在此，我描述基因组学研究的进展，这些进展提供了一个框架，以增进我们对发病机制的理解，并识别用于早期诊断、预后和分层的生物标志物，目标是在类风湿性关节炎中采用个性化医疗方法。
