When assessing disease activity in patients with central sensitisation, the commonly used disease activity scores (eg, DAS28-CRP (C reactive protein)) will yield constant high total scores due to high tender joint count and global health assessments, whereas MRI provides an isolated estimate of inflammation.
SD-OCT-assisted monitoring of choroidal thickness, volume, and microstructure is considered helpful in estimating the burden of inflammation in the choroid and predicting the potential for recovery in acute VKH [14 17].
All results were also hs-CRP adjusted to estimate the impact of inflammation.
Because ferritin is an acute phase reactant, all results were adjusted for hs-CRP to estimate the impact of inflammation.
However, we were not able to estimate other markers of inflammation or level of proinflammatory cytokines like tumor necrosis factor alfa and interleukins in this study.
We estimate the minimum duration of inflammation required to bring the immune system into the weakly regulated state, i.e. to trigger a strong long-lasting immune response.
The percentage of necrotic tumor volume was estimated and the degree of inflammation and the amount of mitoses, macrophages and apoptoses was semiquantitatively scored as none, slight, moderate or severe.
7 The presence of bacteria in contact with the epithelium was estimated (figure 2A and online supplementary figure S1A), and the level of inflammation was estimated on H&E- and Alcian blue/PAS-stained tissue sections evaluating immune cell infiltration, crypt architecture and goblet cell filling ('depletion') (figure 2B,C and online supplementary figure S1B).
The necrotic tumor volume, degree of inflammation and estimates of mitoses, macrophages and apoptosis were obtained from hematoxylin-eosin stained tumor sections by conventional histological evaluation.
