title: Lupus nephritis biomarkers.
abstract: Lupus nephritis (LN), a potentially destructive outcome of SLE, is a real challenge in the management of SLE because of the difficulty in diagnosing its subclinical onset and identifying relapses before serious complications set in. Conventional clinical parameters such as proteinuria, GFR, urine sediments, anti-dsDNA and complement levels are not sensitive or specific enough for detecting ongoing disease activity in lupus kidneys and early relapse of nephritis. There has long been a need for biomarkers of disease activity in LN. Such markers ideally should be capable of predicting early sub-clinical flares and could be used to gauge response to therapy, thus obviating the need for serial renal biopsies with their possible hazardous complications. Since urine can be readily obtained, it lends itself as an obvious biological substrate. In this review, the use of urine and serum as sources of lupus nephritis biomarkers is described, and the results of biomarker discovery studies using candidate and proteomic approaches are summarized.
authors: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, United States; Rheumatology & Rehabilitation Dept., Faculty of Medicine, Minya University, Egypt.
authors: Samar
authors: S
authors: Soliman
authors: Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, United States. Electronic address: cmohan@central.uh.edu.
authors: Chandra
authors: C
authors: Mohan
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D015415:Biomarkers / Q000097:blood / Q000652:urine; D006801:Humans; D008181:Lupus Nephritis / Q000097:blood* / Q000652:urine*
chemical_list: D015415:Biomarkers
keywords: Adhesion molecules; Biomarkers; Chemokines; Cytokines; Diagnostics; Proteomics