Infliximab Treatment Increases Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis: Assessment of Heart Function by Echocardiography, Endothelin 1, Interleukin 6, and NT-pro Brain Natriuretic Peptide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To study the influence of anti-tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) treatment on echocardiographic measures and concentrations of endothelin 1 (ET-1), interleukin 6 (IL-6), and amino-terminal fragment of pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) in a cohort of 23 female patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). METHODS: We recruited 23 patients (mean age 51.3 ± 1.55 yrs) with RA resistant to treatment with disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs and average disease duration of 7.1 ± 1.0 years who had been selected to start treatment with the anti-TNF-α antagonist infliximab. Transthoracic echocardiographic examinations were performed before the first infusion and repeated after 1 year of treatment. Data for age, sex, RA disease activity by Disease Activity Score (DAS28) and echocardiographic data, NT-proBNP, IL-6, ET-1, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), C-reactive protein (CRP), and other routine laboratory data were collected before treatment and after 1 year. RESULTS: Twelve months of treatment with infliximab resulted in reduction of RA activity (i.e., reduction of DAS and acute-phase reactants). There was increased left ventricle ejection fraction, from 58.5% before treatment to 63% after. Treatment with infliximab also resulted in significant reduction of ET-1 (1.26 fmol/ml before treatment vs 0.43 fmol/ml after), IL-6 (58.46 pg/ml vs 3.46 pg/ml), and NT-proBNP (43.06 fmol/ml vs 14.78 fmol/ml). These reductions were observed after just 4 months of treatment and remained significant until the termination of the study. CONCLUSION: In patients with RA, treatment with infliximab contributed significantly to increase in left ventricular ejection fraction. Improvement of cardiac function was shown by conventional echocardiography; there was reduction of biochemical markers of heart failure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".