Low density granulocytes and their gene signature associate with vascular inflammation and coronary atheroclerosis in systemic lupus erythematosus patients

Patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) display an increased risk of cardiovascular disease that is not fully explained by traditional risk factors. This study correlated RNA sequencing data from whole blood of patients with SLE and healthy controls with markers of cardiovascular risk including coronary plaque measured by CT angiogram and vascular inflammation by FDG-PET CT. This dataset includes a total of 53 individual samples from two independent RNAseq runs. This study sought to compare healthy controls to SLE patients and to determine transcriptomic differences in patients that developed vascular damage to those without vascular impairments. The first run compared SLE patients with high noncalcified plaque burdens (NCB) (>1.5 standard deviations of healthy control mean), measured by coronary CT angiography, and patients that had NCB comparable to healthy controls (within 1.5 standard deviations of healthy control mean). The second run validated these findings and compared patients with high vascular inflammation (>1.5 standard deviations of healthy control mean), as measured by target:background ratio (TBR) on FDG-PET/CT scans, to patients with vascular inflammation comparable to healthy controls (within 1.5 standard deviations of healthy control mean).