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The immunology underlying rheumatic diseases

Published on December 12, 2021   25 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Immune System - key concepts and questions

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0:00
My name is Hussein Al-Mossawi. I'm a fellow and lecturer of medicine at St. Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford. Today I'm going to be describing the immunology underlying rheumatic inflammatory diseases.
0:14
The way I've structured this talk is to think about four key areas. Firstly, the framework for the classification of immune-mediated rheumatic diseases. Then secondly, we're going to focus on the interplay between role of the genetics and environmental factors. Thirdly, we'll consider some of the key immune pathways that have been successfully targeted for therapeutic benefit, and then we'll take a future perspective to look at technologies and platforms coming through that will help inform us and better our understanding of these diseases.
0:50
Now we're going to focus on the framework for classifying immune-mediated rheumatic diseases.
0:57
Broadly speaking immune-mediated rheumatic diseases can be thought of in three groups. You have the biggest group and the best described rheumatic immune-mediated disease, which is rheumatoid arthritis. This is a destructive immune-mediated inflammatory arthritis that affects predominantly the small joints of the hands. It can affect multiple other systems in the body. Some features of rheumatoid arthritis overlap with autoimmune connective tissue diseases including systemic lupus erythematosus, systemic sclerosis and inflammatory myopathies. These diseases are multisystem in nature and can affect multiple organs. They're characterised by specific autoantibody profiles that drive the pathology. The connective tissue diseases can overlap with rheumatoid arthritis and share this feature of autoantibody involvement. In the red, you can see a group of diseases that we call the seronegative spondyloarthropathies. These diseases are not characterised by the presence of an autoantibody. They include diseases such as ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis and enteropathic arthritis which is associated with inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.
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The immunology underlying rheumatic diseases

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