It's not just patients with autoimmune diseases like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) that have self-attacking immune cells—healthy people have them too, according to a new report in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a painful, inflammatory type of arthritis that occurs when the body's immune system attacks itself. A new paper, published in this week's issue of PLoS Biology, reports a breakthrough in the understanding of how autoimmune responses can be controlled, offering a promising new strategy for therapy development for rheumatoid arthritis.

Researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery have identified a potential new therapeutic target that could be used to treat inflammatory disorders, such as rheumatoid arthritis.

Methotrexate (MTX) is commonly used to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and is suggested as the "anchor" drug in treating the disease. Despite its widespread use, the understanding of its mechanism of action and pharmacokinetics is limited.

Patients with inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis now have many more treatment options than in the past, including biologic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs).

Rheumatoid Arthritis has been rising in women and researchers have noted an increase in heart attacks because of it. Men, on the other hand have not experienced an increase, and this news comes after a 40 year decline in Rheumatoid Arthritis in women.

After four decades on the decline, rheumatoid arthritis is on the upswing among women in the United States. That's the finding presented by Mayo Clinic investigators at the annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology/Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals in San Francisco.

Following a heart attack, people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) suffer greater heart-related complications, including an increased risk for dying, when compared to other heart attack patients, according to research presented this week at the American College of Rheumatology Annual Scientific Meeting in San Francisco.

It has long been known that environmental factors play a part in the development of rheumatoid arthritis; smoking and drinking alcohol, along with heredity, are particularly instrumental in increasing the risk of the disease.

UC Davis researchers have defined a cellular process that promotes inflammation and, at the same time, found an important starting point for identifying and testing new drugs for diseases such as sepsis, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease and some cancers.

Rheumatoid arthritis is often a more painful experience for women than it is for men, even though the visible symptoms are the same. Scientists are now saying that doctors should take more account of these subjective differences when assessing the need for medication.

B cells, the source of damaging autoantibodies, have long been thought to depend upon T cells for their activation and were not considered important in the initiation of autoimmune diseases like lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.