Is Arthritis Linked to Higher Post-MI Death Risk?

It is now known that rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients had significantly higher long-term death rate after myocardial infarction (MI) than did matched MI patients without RA. This was revealed in a review of a population-based cohort of patients. The RA patients also exhibited an increased risk of recurrent ischemia when compared to those patients who did not have RA.

A team of researchers analysed a set of data from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, which includes all of the records from health care providers for the population of Olmsted County, Minnesota. They looked specifically at 77 RA patients and 154 age- and sex-matched patients without RA who had an MI between 1979, and 2010.

Overall, around 55 per cent of patients in both cohorts were female. The mean age at MI was 72.4 years old. It was known that there were no significant differences between cohorts regarding MI risk factors such as hypertension, dyslipidaemia, diabetes, smoking status and weight. MI characteristics, severity, and electrocardiogram findings were also known to be similar.

Additionally, the RA patients and the other patients who were unaffected were known to have no differences in treatment during and after MI and in-hospital mortality. Mortality at 30 days post MI and at 1 year post MI was also similar.

The similarities ended for long-term mortality. The authors of the study discovered that during a median follow-up of 2.6 years among the RA cohort, 55 of the patients died. That is compared to the 85 patients who died over a median 2.7 years in the control cohort.

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Is Arthritis Linked to Higher Post-MI Death Risk?

Categories: Arthritis, cohort, Long term, MI, Mortality, Patients, post mi, RA, ra patients, risk, years

Treatment Not Good Enough For Cervical Arthritis Patients

According to the worrying results of a recent study, around five per cent of patients who suffer with rheumatoid arthritis and who received outpatient therapy had cervical arthritis, and about half of those did not receive adequate treatment at diagnosis.

A team of researchers from Germany conducted a cervical screening chart review of 395 patients who have rheumatoid arthritis (RA) at an outpatient clinic over a period of three months. The results admitted that these patients partially overlapped with eight patients who underwent C1–C2 fusion for RA cervical involvement from an orthopaedic surgery department.

The charts for 67 patients (or 17 per cent) did not include reports on cervical spine X-ray films; these included 21 (eight percent) of 257 with disease duration of five years or more. 17 of the 347 RA patients (or five per cent of all outpatient patients with X-rays), however, had an atlantodental distance of more than 3 mm. Four other RA patients from the orthopaedic surgery department fusion cohort were added for a total of 21 patients with cervical arthritis. 12 of them did not have symptoms.

Erosive peripheral arthritis with at least 10 years of disease duration was indicated in all 21 patients who had cervical arthritis and all of them were found to be rheumatoid factor-positive. Around half of these patients were not under adequate therapy when cervical problem was diagnosed, and none were on biological response modifiers.

Despite some unusual therapeutic approaches, we have found cervical arthritis in approximately five per cent of patients with rheumatoid arthritis seen at the division’s outpatient clinic. More than two-thirds of those patients were free form symptoms and erosive seropositive rheumatoid factor with longer disease duration and inadequately controlled disease activity predicted increased risk.

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Treatment Not Good Enough For Cervical Arthritis Patients

Categories: Arthritis, cervical arthritis, disease duration, orthopaedic surgery, outpatient clinic, Patients, ra patients, Rheumatoid Arthritis, rheumatoid factor, surgery department