Synovial Tissue Acquisition from Rheumatic Patients

Synovial membrane samples were obtained either from postmortem joints/traumatic joint injury cases (control group (CG); n = 15 and n = 5, respectively) or from RA/OA patients (all Caucasian) upon joint replacement/synovectomy at the Jena University Hospital, Chair of Orthopedics, Waldkrankenhaus ‘Rudolf Elle’, Eisenberg, Germany (n = 33, dataset ‘Jena’), at the Department of Orthopedics/Institute of Pathology/Department of Rheumatology and Clinical Immunology, Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin (n = 30, dataset ‘Berlin’), and at the Department of Orthopedics/Institute of Pathology, University of Leipzig (n = 16, dataset ‘Leipzig’). After removal, tissue samples were frozen and stored at −70°C.
The study was approved by the respective ethics committees (Jena University Hospital: Ethics Committee of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena at the Medical Faculty; Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin: Charité Ethics Committee; and University of Leipzig: Ethics Committee at the Medical Faculty of the University of Leipzig) and informed patient consent was obtained. RA patients were classified according to the American College of Rheumatology criteria valid in the sample assessment period [15 (link)], OA patients were classified according to the respective criteria for OA [16 (link)]. The patients/donors were assigned to one of the three terms (categorical values): ‘CG’, ‘RA’, or ‘OA’ (for clinical characteristics of the donors/patients, see Table 1).