Background/Purpose: Behcet’s disease (BD) is a chronic systemic inflammatory disorder characterized by recurrent oral aphtae and other systemic involvement. Red blood cell distribution width (RDW) is a measurement of heterogeneity in size. RDW is commonly used in the differential diagnosis of anemia, but recently, RDW has been thought to be an inflammatory marker in many diseases. In this study, we investigated whether RDW might be a marker that reflects the disease activity of BD

Methods: 188 patients with BD were enrolled and divided into active and inactive group by Behcet’s Disease Current Activity Form 2006. 100 normal healthy individuals were enrolled as control group. In addition to RDW, laboratory results including white blood cell count, hemoglobin, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and C-reactive protein (CRP) were assessed.

Results: RDW was significantly higher in patients with active BD than both inactive BD and healthy control groups (p < 0.05) and also significantly higher in inactive BD group than in healthy control group (p < 0.05)(Figure 1). RDW was more positively correlated with disease activity index [correlation coefficient (r) = 0.299, p < 0.05] (Figure 2) than ESR (r = 0.193, p < 0.05) or CRP (r = 0.221, p < 0.05). Among clinical variables, RDW greater than 13.35 % was significantly associated with disease activity on univariate analysis (p < 0.05) and multivariate analysis revealed that the disease activity was associated with RDW only (OR 2.603 95% confidence interval 1.609, 4.214, p < 0.05)(Table 1).

Conclusion: RDW is independently associated with the disease activity of BD. Our findings indicated that RDW is more significant marker of the disease activity than ESR or CRP in BD.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Table 1.

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ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/association-between-red-blood-cell-distribution-width-and-disease-activity-in-behcets-disease/