Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) leads to irreversible structural damage to joints, and it is critical to achieve a rapid suppression of inflammation in order to minimize disease associated damages. The best mean to achieve this goal is diagnosis and treatment as early as possible. RA's prevalence is estimated to be about 0.5% in most European populations, and it is therefore the most frequent chronic autoimmune inflammatory rheumatism.

The early clinical presentation of RA is very heterogeneous hence difficult to diagnose. Moreover, the current classification criteria for RA are not often fulfilled in the early stages of the disease. Furthermore, determining the outcome of a treatment in RA patients is also sometimes difficult to assess and currently relies on subjective scoring. Finally, when remission is achieved, it remains important to predict safe discontinuity of treatment allowing to maintain sustained remission and to reduce cost of expensive therapies such as biologics.

We invite investigators to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that will stimulate the continuing efforts to characterise biomarkers in RA that may be useful in diagnosis and/or prognosis and may predict the response to treatments (DMARDs, biologics).

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Cytokines as early biomarkers
• Bone biomarkers
• New autoantibodies specificities
• Carbamylation of antigens
• Targets of anticitrullinated antibodies
• Synovial markers
• Genetic markers/gene expression
• Cardiovascular risk markers
• Proteomic markers
• Predictors of response to biologics treatment

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/mi/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/mi/bmra/ according to the following timetable: