Abstract
We created synovial enhancement score (SES) of the wrist with Gd-DTPA enhanced MRI for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) . To evaluate the clinical predictive values, various clinical parameters including age, duration of disease, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), Lansbury activity index (LI) were retrospectively surveyed. A total of 149 MRI examinations from 96 rheumatoid patients were reviewed and correlated with matched clinical data, out of which ESR and LI showed relatively high correlation coefficients (0.43 with the p-value of<0.001 and 0.44 with the p-value of 0.006, respectively) . To determine whether patients with seronegative RA differ in SES from patients with seropositive RA, 25 patients with seronegative RA were closely matched with seropositive control subjects. In spite of radiographic carpal predominancy previously reported in seronegative rheumatoid patients, seronegative RA patients had significantly lower SES (11.9 vs 19.1 points with p-value of 0.0006) . MRI synovial enhancement score of the wrist with Gd-DTPA sppears to have a good clinical predictive value for RA patients. Seronegative RA patients had less severe synovial enhancement of the wrist as compared with seropositive RA patients.
