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Purpose Juvenile Arthritis Disease Activity Score (JADAS) is a recently developed composite tool for scoring disease activity in juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). JADAS consists of four items; the joint count, the physician and the patient’s/parent’s global assessment and the erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) as an inflammatory marker. C-reactive protein (CRP) is often a more rapid and available test than ESR and has been suggested as an alternative inflammatory marker. The aim of the study was to validate and compare the CRP versus the ESR as an inflammatory marker in JADAS and to test whether higher JADAS scores were associated to DMARD treatment in a cohort of Nordic children with JIA in a near population-based setting.

Antibodies specific for native human type II collagen (anti-CII) characterize an early inflammatory/destructive phenotype in adults with RA. There are no data presented so far on this antibody and its possible influence on disease course/outcome in children with JIA.

Address: 1Department of Pediatrics, University Hospital of North Norway and Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromso, Tromso, Norway, 2Department of Pediatrics, University Hospital of North Norway, Tromso, Norway, 3Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromso, Tromso, Norway, 4Department of Women's and Children's Health, Uppsala University Children's Hospital, Uppsala, Sweden and 5Department of Laboratory Medicine, Children's and Women's Health, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Department of Pediatrics, St. Olavs Hospital, Trondheim, Norway * Corresponding author

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) refers to chronic childhood arthritides of unknown aetiology with onset before the age of 16 and persisting for more than 6 weeks. According to ILAR criteria patients are divided into 7 categories of which oligoarthritis is the most common one in western countries. It is further distinguished into persistent and extended oligoarthritis depending on whether the disease is confined to four or fewer joints or it extends to more than four joints after the first 6 months of the illness. Earlier studies have proposed factors that could predict the severity in oligoarticular-onset JIA such as high initial erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and involvement of upper limb. However, more studies are needed for better and earlier identification of high-risk patients to prevent possible permanent damages.