Rheumatoid Arthritis and Proteus
Alan Ebringer Rheumatoid Arthritis and Proteus
Alan Ebringer B.Sc., M.D., FRCP, FRACP, FRCPath Professor of Immunology King s College London and Honorary Consultant Rheumatologist Middlesex Hospital UCH School of Medicine King s College London Division of Life Sciences Franklin-Wilkins Building 150 Stamford Street London, SE1 8WA UK ISBN 978-0-85729-949-9 e-isbn 978-0-85729-950-5 DOI 10.1007/978-0-85729-950-5 Springer London Dordrecht Heidelberg New York British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939310 Springer-Verlag London Limited 2012 Whilst we have made considerable efforts to contact all holders of copyright material contained in this book, we may have failed to locate some of them. Should holders wish to contact the Publisher, we will be happy to come to some arrangement with them. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. The use of registered names, trademarks, etc., in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Product liability: The publisher can give no guarantee for information about drug dosage and application thereof contained in this book. In every individual case the respective user must check its accuracy by consulting other pharmaceutical literature. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
This book is dedicated to the memory of the late Dr. Mary Corbett (1933 2009) who was a Consultant Rheumatologist at the Middlesex Hospital (1969 1994) in London. She was an excellent clinician, meticulous in her clinical care of patients and always available for friendly advice and support. She was the first to start a Rheumatoid Arthritis Prospective Study (RAPS) in the UK which was a comprehensive and longitudinal investigation of the disease, and established that early treatment was necessary before erosive changes had occurred. Mary Corbett was a co-author of the first paper which linked the urinary microbe Proteus to rheumatoid arthritis, the study having been carried out on her patients.
To my wife
Contents 1 Scope and Distribution of the RA Problem... 1 2 History of the Attempts to Find the Cause of RA... 9 3 HLA-DR1/4 and Antibodies to Proteus in London... 19 4 Antibodies to Proteus in Irish patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis... 35 5 Antibodies to Proteus in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients from Bermuda and from Hertfordshire in England... 43 6 Antibodies to Proteus in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients from Brest and Toulouse in France... 55 7 Dutch Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis Have Antibodies to Proteus... 63 8 Anti-Proteus Antibodies in Norwegian Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients Following a Lactovegetarian Diet... 75 9 Antibodies to Proteus in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients from Norway, Spain and England... 83 10 Antibodies to Proteus in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients from Southern Japan... 95 ix
xcontents 11 Urine Cultures and Correlation... 103 12 Molecular Similarity Between the Shared Epitope of Rheumatoid Arthritis and Bacteria... 113 13 The Shared Epitope, Proteus Haemolysin, Type XI Collagen and Rheumatoid Arthritis... 121 14 Gram-Negative Bacteria Possess Sequences Which Resemble the Shared Epitope but only Proteus Infect Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients... 137 15 Immune Responses to Proteus in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients from Finland and Japan... 145 16 Molecular Similarity Between the Rheumatoid Arthritis Associated Motif EQKRAA and Structurally Related Sequences of Proteus... 157 17 Rheumatoid Arthritis Sera Are Cytotoxic to Cells Bearing HLA and Collagen Susceptibility Sequences... 171 18 The Scientific Method of Sir Karl Popper... 191 19 Rheumatoid Arthritis and Popper Sequences... 201 Index... 227