Objective and Methods
Antigenic peptides anchor by amino acid residues to pockets within the antigen-binding groove of the HLA-DRB1 molecule. In order to assess whether a pocket-wise analysis of HLA-encoded susceptibility might provide a better fit to the immunogenetic data in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) than the shared epitope hypothesis, HLA-DRB1 typing findings in 167 patients with recent onset RA and in 166 controls were analyzed.