Similar to our findings, no statistical differences were observed by Zhu et al. (2012) when evaluating the relationship between TRAF6 expression in synovial tissue and clinical features of RA patients, although studies indicated overexpression of TRAF6 in synovial of RA and RA-fibroblast-like synoviocytes (RA-FLSs) (Zhu et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2015b). Here, TRAF6 is linked to rheumatoid arthritis.