Yue J, et al. - In this prospective cohort study, researchers compared micro RNA (miRNA) expression between healthy people and early rheumatoid arthritis (ERA) patients with and without erosion on high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) at baseline and investigated whether these miRNAs could inform a signature predictive of erosion progression despite treatment with conventional synthetic disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (csDMARDs). HR-pQCT screened the second metacarpophalangeal head in 117 ERA patients at baseline and 1 year. In 10 ERA patients with and without HR-pQCT erosion, they performed global profiling of 377 miRNAs at baseline and six healthy controls. A severe form of the disease can be characterized by differential expressions of circulating miR-143-3p, miR-145-5p and miR-99b-5p in the plasma of ERA patients. In particular, MiR-99b-5p can serve as a possible predictor for erosion progression.