ORIGINAL ARTICLE ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ASSOCIATION OF TUMOR NECROSIS FACTOR ALPHA (TNF- A) WITH CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES (CVDS) IN RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS (RA): CAN ANTI TNF- A THERAPY REDUCES CVDS IN RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS?

Aim of the work: Evaluation of serum TNF- α in rheumatoid arthritic (RA) patient associated with cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and comparison between RA patients treated by anti TNF- α with RA patients treated by synthetic disease modifying anti rheumatic drugs (DMARDs). Methodology: This study included 100 new cases of RA, group treated by anti TNF - α therapy and another group treated by synthetic DMARDs. After one year from treatment CVDs evaluated and serum TNF - α was measured. Results: CVDs reported in 62 % of RA cases. 28.0% had normal levels of TNF - α while 72.0% had higher levels. TNF-α level were significant higher in cases of RA with CVDs, when compared to RA cases without CVDs (79.5% vs. 16.7% respectively, p < 0.001). RA patients treated by anti TNF - α, had low incidence of CVDs, where, 70.5% of them hadn't CVDs, while 29.5 % of them had CVDs. But the patients treated by synthetic DMARDs, had higher incidence of CVDs, where 68.67 % of patients treated by synthetic DMARDs had CVDs, while 31.33 % of them