Diagnostic utility of antibodies to structural protein and fibroblast intermediate filament, vimentin, in the detection of rheumatoid arthritis

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the specificity and sensitivity of serum anti-mutated citrullinated vimentin (MCV) antibodies in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients and to determine their diagnostic utility compared to anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies and rheumatoid factor (RF). Materials and Methods: This study employs a cross-sectional design. Patients were categorized using the 2010 American College of Rheumatology RA criteria. The first group consists of 60 cases, of which 30 are seropositive RA, and 30 are seronegative RA. The second group consists of 60 controls, of which 30 are RF-positive connective tissue disorder (CTD) cases and 30 are healthy. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kits were used to quantify the amounts of anti-MCV and anti-cyclic citrullinated protein. Statistical analysis: Version 9 of GraphPad Prism was utilized for doing the statistical analysis. We employed the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, one-way ANOVA, Student’s t-test, the Kruskal-Walli or Mann-Whitney U tests, and Fisher’s exact or Chi-Square tests for statistical analysis. To study associations between variables, Spearman’s correlation test is used. Results: The anti-MCV (ng/mL) median concentrations in healthy controls, CTD controls, seronegative RA, and seropositive RA are 1.487, 5.294, 10.51, and 7.985, respectively, and show a significant increase ( P < 0.05) in comparison to healthy controls. Seropositive and seronegative RA subjects did not differ statistically significantly in their anti-MCV levels. According to receiver operating characteristic analysis results, anti-MCV has 100% sensitivity and 83.33% specificity in seropositive RA cases with an optimal cutoff of 6.38 ng/mL and 100% sensitivity and 83.33% specificity in RF-negative RA cases with an ideal cutoff of 6.63 ng/mL. Conclusions: The higher levels found in both seropositive and seronegative cases of RA suggest the possibility of using serum anti-MCV as a sensitive RA marker. Anti-MCV may help in the diagnosis of RA, especially seronegative arthritis.