Hear me out, measles can cause immune system amnesia. People with autoimmune disorders have immune systems that want to kill them. What if we use the immune system amnesia property of measles to reset the immune system of people suffering with autoimmune disorders? Maybe we could do some crispr on the measles virus to make it not as dangerous or something like that first though.
Thanks for links. As someone recently diagnosed with RA, I’m still trying to absorb as much information on it as possible.
What’s interesting about the study is it focused on RA patients without positive rheumatoid factor (RF) blood work. Now, in my skimming I didn’t see it mention anti-CCP, which is the more definitive test for RA. Despite the name, positive RF alone could be any number of things that aren’t RA. They didn’t mention if they were totally seronegative, though.
I have an unsubstantiated theory that seronegative and seropositive RA may be distinct diseases, but we don’t know enough yet and we treat them the same, so they get the same name. If the pts in this study were totally seronegative, that could correlate to my theory where maybe “seronegative RA” is actually more of a long-term infection triggered by measles. But these are just idle musings.
As a side note, the name rheumatoid arthritis is pretty silly from an etymological standpoint. The words basically break down as:
So put together, it’s “inflammatory-like joint inflammation.”