Investigating the link between vasculitis and blood clot formation

Summary

Vasculitis is a rare autoimmune disease which mainly affects adults over the age of 50. It causes inflammation and narrowing of the blood vessels that transport blood to and from the body’s vital organs. Sometimes people also develop blood clots which can have serious complications. We do not know why blood clots form, but we think that the inflammation may be activating a group of blood cells called “platelets”. When we cut ourselves, for example, platelets are activated to stick together to form a plug that stops the bleeding.

We want to find out if vasculitis affects how platelets are activated and if that causes them to form abnormal blood clots. This is important because blood clots can cause heart attacks and strokes.

We want to compare platelets and blood clotting in people with and without vasculitis. We have already collected blood samples from vasculitis patients and would now like to collect samples from people without vasculitis or autoimmune disease. We will do laboratory experiments on the samples to see if platelets in people with vasculitis contain special proteins that activate clotting.

We will also study how platelets stick together to form a plug when they are stimulated. We hope to learn how platelets contribute to blood clot formation in vasculitis. This could also influence treatments for people with vasculitis to reduce their risk of blood clots.

The NIHR BioResource is a unique resource which lets us select participants without vasculitis or autoimmune disease who match our patient cohort in age, gender and ethnicity. Without the NIHR BioResource’s large cohort of healthy volunteers, it would be very difficult for us to recruit people of the same age as our vasculitis patients (65 and above), since the majority of our healthy volunteers are students and staff at the University of Leeds.