European Journal of Rheumatology
Invited Review

Biomarkers as an opportunity to stratify for outcome in systemic sclerosis

1.

Rheumatology Institute of Lucania (IReL), Rheumatology Department of Lucania, San Carlo Hospital, Potenza, Italy

2.

NIHR Leeds Biomedical Research Centre, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust Leeds, United Kingdom

3.

Leeds Institute of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Medicine, University of Leeds, United Kingdom

Eur J Rheumatol 2020; 7: Supplement S193-S202
DOI: 10.5152/eurjrheum.2020.19065
Read: 881 Downloads: 521 Published: 20 July 2020

Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a highly complex disease whose heterogeneity includes multiple aspects of the condition, such as clinical presentation, progression, extent and type of organ involvement, and clinical outcomes. Thus far, these features remain not easily predictable both at the patient group level and in a given patient with regard to age at onset and clinical course. The unpredictable clinical course represents an obstacle to focusing potentially effective treatment in patients that need it the most. At the time of organ involvement and clinical diagnosis, most of the clinical manifestations are irreversible; therefore, predicting outcomes becomes crucial. This can explain the multiple attempts to identify prognostic, predictive, and monitoring—both soluble and imaging—biomarkers over the past years. They range from the currently most used biomarkers, the autoantibodies associated with disease-specific clinical features and course, to the single recently proposed skin, lung, cardiac involvement biomarkers and to the composite scores capturing multiple aspects of the disease. This review will focus on soluble and imaging biomarkers that recently showed promising evidence for outcome stratification in patients with SSc.

Cite this article as: Abignano G, Del Galdo F. Biomarkers as an opportunity to stratify for outcome in systemic sclerosis. Eur J Rheumatol 2020; 7(Suppl 3): S193-202.

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