Exercise-induced Improvements of Inflammatory Status in Patients With Rheumatoid Arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, systemic inflammatory disorder that may affect many tissues and organs, but principally attacks synovial joints. Although the cause of rheumatoid arthritis is unknown, autoimmunity plays a role in both the chronicity and progression, and RA is considered as a systemic autoimmune disease.

Due to chronic inflammatory status, RA-patients are at higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) compared to the general population. Accumulating evidence indicates that regular physical activity has beneficial effects on RA. The mechanisms behind exercise-induce improvements are none the less unclear and more research is needed to better understand the beneficial effects of exercise training in this patient group.

Recently, promising results from gene expression studies of blood cells have revealed unexplored fields of biomarker discovery and gene expression profiling of disease. Due to easy accessible and minimally invasive sample collection, gene expression profiling of whole blood might turn out to be a promising tool in molecular diagnostics and clinical medicine. To our knowledge, whole-genome transcriptional changes have not previously been studied in RA-patients undergoing a high-intensity exercise program.

Hypothesis: Ten weeks of high intensity interval training improves the inflammatory status, quality of life, and known risk factors for cardiovascular diseases.

In addition to measure traditionally inflammatory markers in the blood, whole genome analysis will be made.

Inclusion criteria

• Ability to exercise
• written consent

Exclusion criteria

• Inability to exercise
• Known ischemic cardiovascular disease
• Severe pulmonary disease
• High activity level
• Pregnancy
• drug/alcohol abuse
• Unstable RA
• diagnosis before 2000