protist@mander.xyz 1 day ago
I’m no expert, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but I found this study indicating among a samples of people with rheumatoid arthritis, having a previous measles infection was overrepresented, and then I found this discussion indicating scientists are already studying immunotherapy methods that may give you the effect of an immune system reset but in a safe and targeted way. The measles virus itself likely just has too many potential short- and long-term effects to be worth the risk, but that doesn’t mean studying how it works won’t be useful!
Reyali@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Thanks for links. As someone recently diagnosed with RA, I’m still trying to absorb as much information on it as possible.
What’s interesting about the study is it focused on RA patients without positive rheumatoid factor (RF) blood work. Now, in my skimming I didn’t see it mention anti-CCP, which is the more definitive test for RA. Despite the name, positive RF alone could be any number of things that aren’t RA. They didn’t mention if they were totally seronegative, though.
I have an unsubstantiated theory that seronegative and seropositive RA may be distinct diseases, but we don’t know enough yet and we treat them the same, so they get the same name. If the pts in this study were totally seronegative, that could correlate to my theory where maybe “seronegative RA” is actually more of a long-term infection triggered by measles. But these are just idle musings.
As a side note, the name rheumatoid arthritis is pretty silly from an etymological standpoint. The words basically break down as:
So put together, it’s “inflammatory-like joint inflammation.”