Serum metabolomic profiling predicts synovial gene expression in rheumatoid arthritis

Background Metabolomics is an emerging field of biomedical research that may offer a better understanding of the mechanisms of underlying conditions including inflammatory arthritis. Perturbations caused by inflamed synovial tissue can lead to correlated changes in concentrations of certain metabolites in the synovium and thereby function as potential biomarkers in blood. Here, we explore the hypothesis of whether characterization of patients’ metabolomic profiles in blood, utilizing 1H-nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), predicts synovial marker profiling in rheumatoid arthritis (RA).