Rituximab Downregulates Gene Expression Associated with Cell Proliferation, Survival, and Proteolysis in the Peripheral Blood from Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients: A Link between High Baseline Autophagy-Related ULK1 Expression and Improved Pain Control

Table 1

Spearmen’s correlation coefficients and their significance () are shown for the expression of the examined genes in relation to each other and immunological marker in RA patients () at baseline.

	ULK1	P21	Caspase 3	MMP-9	Cathepsin K	TNFα	COX2	IFNα
MTOR	0.891; p < 0.001	0.607; p = 0.01	0.878; p < 0.001	0.597; p = 0.01	0.859; p < 0.001	0.747; p < 0.001
ULK1		0.800; p = 0.003	0.963; p < 0.001	0.729; p = 0.002	0.906; p < 0.001	0.792; p < 0.001
P21			0.773; p < 0.001	0.600; p = 0.01	0.954; p < 0.001	0.758; p < 0.001
Caspase 3				0.723; p = 0.002	0.927; p < 0.001	0.797; p < 0.001
MMP-9					0.651; p = 0.01
Cathepsin K						0.840; p < 0.001
IL-1β							0.611; p = 0.01	0.608; p = 0.002
RF		0.585; p = 0.01			0.607; p = 0.02		0.529; p = 0.03