Ectopic Nociceptor Sprouting as a Key Peripheral Driver of Pain in Rheumatoid Arthritis
Abstract
Purpose of review: Pain is one of the most debilitating sequelae of rheumatoid arthritis. Established and emerging therapies offer effective disease control for many patients, though they often have underwhelming efficacy for pain relief. The uncoupling of pain intensity from disease activity and inflammation presents an ongoing challenge in both our understanding of the pathophysiology and our ability to treat joint pain. The generation of high-parameter, unbiased -omic data sets generated from patient-derived tissues is changing how we think about rheumatoid arthritis pain. In this review, we discuss the peripheral drivers of pain in rheumatoid arthritis-affected joints and their innervating primary afferents. We evaluate how human molecular immunology and neuroscience approaches are helping us unravel the heterogeneity of pain in rheumatoid arthritis and propose future directions to clarify how pain is maintained in the absence of inflammation.
Recent findings: Synovial fibroblasts have emerged as key pronociceptive drivers within the rheumatic joint. Further to the classical proinflammatory mediators known to drive pain, such as cytokines and prostaglandins, bone morphogenetic proteins, ephrin signaling, and netrins appear to be upregulated in both rheumatoid arthritis-affected synovium and the innervating sensory neurons. Resulting adaptations to innervating primary afferents such as synaptogenesis and neurite outgrowth may occur in a sensory neuron subtype-specific…
Read the paper
Related studies
- Noninvasive and Point-of-Care Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS)-Based Breathalyzer for Mass Screening of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) under 5 min
- De Novo Transcriptome Analysis and Detection of Antimicrobial Peptides of the American Cockroach Periplaneta americana (Linnaeus)
- Molecular Characterization and Expression Profiling of Tomato GRF Transcription Factor Family Genes in Response to Abiotic Stresses and Phytohormones
- Assembly of Tight Junction Strands: Claudin-10b and Claudin-3 Form Homo Tetrameric Building Blocks that Polymerise in a Channel-Independent Manner
- Update of the Pompe variant database for the prediction of clinical phenotypes: Novel disease‐associated variants, common sequence variants, and results from newborn screening
- Machine Learning-Based SERS Chemical Space for Two-Way Prediction of Structures and Spectra of Untrained Molecules
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.