SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 -- Smoking seems to strongly increase rheumatoid arthritis risk among individuals with genetic susceptibility to the disease, researchers found.
People with the genotype most linked to rheumatoid arthritis risk in Caucasians roughly doubled their already-elevated chances of developing the disease if they smoked (relative risk 8.7 versus 4.8 for nonsmokers), Emeli Lundström, of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, and colleagues reported.
Their study, published in the June issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, revealed interactions with smoking for all distinct allele groups with a shared epitope of amino acid sequences on the DRB1 gene.
This gene has been found to have the strongest ties to the 60% of rheumatoid arthritis cases in which anticitrullinated protein autoantibodies are detected, the researchers noted.
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