الفهرس 
AcknowledgmentOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 163 |  |  |
| | | from | 163 | | |
Abstract
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory systemic Disease the produce its most prominent manifestations in the diarthroidal joints. The disease encompass a wide spectrum of features from self limiting disease to progressively chronic disease with varying degrees of joint destruction to clinicaly evident extra-articular manifestations (Weyand et al., 1995). The etiology of RA is unknown. The presentaition of a relevant antigen to an immunogenetically susceptible host is bleived to trigger RA. A majority of patients with RA carry HLA-DR4, HLA-DRI or both (Krige & Graziano, 1996). The aim of this work is to analyse HLA-DR4 alleles in Egyptian patients with rheumatoid arthritis and to evaluate the effect of the responsible alleles on the severity of the disease and also on the response to methotrexate therapy using molecular biologic technique. The study comprised 20 patients with R-A [ 1 5 females & 5 males] and I 0 healthy subjects matched for age and sex with our patients [7 females & 3 males]. For statistical analysis of HLA data, 121 normal Egyptian subjects were taken as controls. * All members of this study were subjected to the following: • Thorough history taking. Thorough clinical examination with special stress on the peripheral joints.