Circulating cell-free DNA correlate to disease activity and treatment response of patients with radiographic axial spondyloarthritis

Patients’characteristics

Seventy-nine de novo r-axSpA patients were enrolled in the discovery cohort, and 60 patients were enrolled in the validation cohort to evaluate cfDNA at diagnosis. The baseline demographic features including age (33 ± 7) and gender (30 males and 12 females) were similar between r-axSpA patients and healthy controls. The patients’ features were summarized in Table 1. Only one patient in discovery cohort experienced uveitis as the extra-articular manifestation, the rest patients in both cohorts showed no manifestations of other extra-articular involvement…