The Relationship Between Kidney Histology, Joint Involvement and Urine Excretion of Glycosaminoglycans in SLE Patients

Authors: Aytül SİN, Dilek ÖZMEN, Ender TERZİOĞLU, Gülçin BAŞDEMİR, Oya BAYINDIR, Eker DOĞANAVŞARGİL

Abstract: In Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) patients, renal involvement is the most important complication during the disease course and directly effects the prognosis of the disease. Its presence and especially histologic type modulates the treatment protocol. It is very important to know the presence and severity of renal lesions in SLE cases both for physician ad patient but the cold face of biopsy and fear is more important for patients than physicians. Hence, it has been thought that without using invasive methods as biopsy, some biochemical parameters in urine might also give a clue about the severity and presence of the renal involvement. In this study, we tried to show that whether the value of glycosamino glycans (GAG), a major element of connective tissue, in urine would be a reasonable test to show the presence and severity of renal lesions. The excretion of GAG found to be higher in 65 patients than 17 control group (p<0.05). We observe that total urine GAG excretion did not change in the patients regardless of with or without lupus nephritis and was not correlated to the histological classification and activity/chronity index in the renal involvement group. As we expected, total GAG values were positively correlated with the number of effected joints and found to be higher in patients with more inflammatory joints.

Keywords: Urine glycosamino glycans, SLE, arthritis, lupus nephritis