The current diagnostic measures for inflammatory arthritis lack the required specificity to appropriately divide patients. Thus, new methods to categorise patients with these conditions needs to be explored.

This study explains whether urinary proteomic biomarkers specific for various forms of arthritis (rheumatoid arthritis (RA), psoriatic arthritis (PsA), osteoarthritis (OA)) or chronic inflammatory conditions (inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)) can be recognised.

All in all, 50 participants per group with RA, PsA, OA or IBD and 50 healthy controls were inculcated in the study. About two-thirds of these populations were randomly assigned as a training set, while the rest one-third were reserved for validation. Multiple urinary peptides significantly associated with discrete pathological conditions were revealed as a result of sequential comparison of one group to the other four. The classifiers for the five groups were made and  tested blind in the validation test set.

These classifers portrayed superb performance, with an area under the curve between 0.90 and 0.97 per group. The identified peptide markers revealed novel inflammatory markers along with dysregulation of collagen synthesis and inflammation.

We cease to know that urinary peptide signatures can efficiently differentiate between chronic arthropathies and inflammatory conditions with distinct pathogenesis.