FIGURE 1.

The hierarchical dominance of cytokines during rheumatoid arthritis development is dynamic. Recent insights permit a speculative depiction of how individual cytokines may exhibit distinct and evolving patterns of relative importance, even during the earliest phases of ACPA-seropositive rheumatoid arthritis. Whilst pro-inflammatory cytokines are clearly important drivers of seronegative disease, a paucity of equivalent data for this subset currently precludes a similarly granular representation of this or other, as yet undefined, rheumatoid arthritis ‘pathotypes’.