CRP and rheumatoid arthritis: Table 1 provides demographic and clinical data for these 19 RA patients at baseline and after 6 months of treatment. The characteristics of RA patients from R and NR at baseline were comparable for all parameters suggesting absence of bias in patient selection (p>0.05). In the R subset, tender joint count, swollen joint count, global assessment of disease measured by the patient with visual analog scale, disease activity score (DAS28-CRP) (p<0.001) and CRP (p<0.05) improved significantly after 6 months of treatment, while in the NR subset no parameters improved significantly (Table 1).