Pregnancy-induced gene expression changes in vivo among women with rheumatoid arthritis: a pilot study

Abstract Background Little is known about gene expression changes induced by pregnancy in women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and healthy women because the few studies previously conducted did not have pre-pregnancy samples available as baseline. We have established a cohort of women with RA and healthy women followed prospectively from a pre-pregnancy baseline. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that pregnancy-induced changes in gene expression among women with RA who improve during pregnancy (pregDASimproved) overlap substantially with changes observed among healthy women and differ from changes observed among women with RA who worsen during pregnancy (pregDASworse). Methods Global gene expression profiles were generated by RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) from 11 women with RA and 5 healthy women before pregnancy (T0) and at the third trimester (T3). Among the women with RA, eight showed an improvement in disease activity by T3, whereas three worsened. Differential expression analysis was used to identify genes demonstrating significant changes in expression within each of the RA and healthy groups (T3 vs T0), as well as between the groups at each time point. Gene set enrichment was assessed in terms of Gene Ontology processes and protein networks. Results A total of 1296 genes were differentially expressed between T3 and T0 among the 8 pregDASimproved women, with 161 genes showing at least two-fold change (FC) in expression by T3. The majority (108 of 161 genes) were also differentially expressed among healthy women (q