Background: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory, autoimmune disease, which may lead to arterial dysfunction. Treatment with anti-TNF-α infliximab can influence not only inflammation, disease activity, but can also greatly impact arterial wall function.

Aim of the study was to assess whether aortic augmentation index (AIx) and regional carotid-radial pulse wave velocity (PWV) were altered in RA patients treated with infliximab.

Methods: We examined 75 RA patients (age 42.03±10.69 years) with high disease activity (DAS28 5.40±0.93), 16 of them were treated with infliximab. AIx and PWV were assessed non-invasively by applanation tonometry (Sphygmocor v.7.01, AtCor Medical).

Results: By multiple regression analysis we have found that carotid-radial PWV depends only on mean blood pressure (MBP) and infliximab therapy. To test the influence of infliximab on arterial wall parameters, binary variable indicating the intake of infliximab was added to the list of independent predictors. The same forward analysis was applied after that. It has been established that infliximab reduced the values of PWV as compare with patients not treated with infliximab (7.69±0.69 vs. 8.61±1.02; p=0.001). However, no similar trend was observed for AIx (18.38±12.48 vs. 24.56±11.44; p=0.094). The estimated regression coefficient have implied that given fixed MBP, the mean PWV can be reduced approximately to 0.886 m/s in patients treated with infliximab.

Conclusions: The treatment with anti-TNF-α infliximab can influence the conduit arteries. Carotid-radial PWV may serve as a good marker to decide upon infliximab.