Epigenetic changes can explain rheumatism
A new study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US shows that so-called epigenetic changes in the DNA are involved in causing rheumatoid arthritis, and that these changes can be genetically predetermined. The paper, which is published in the scientific periodical Nature Biotechnology, sheds light on how risk genes can be expressed in disease and why some individuals are affected more readily than others.Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has been shown to be closely associated with the genes or parts of the genome (DNA) that are