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Rheumatoid Arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis is a "chronic inflammatory, multi-system illness, involving primarily the joints with a history of exacerbations and remissions rheumatoid arthritis, rumatoid arthritis, rheumatic arthritis, rhumatoid arthritis." It is a multi-system disorder rheumatoid arthritis, rumatoid arthritis, rheumatic arthritis, rhumatoid arthritis. When we look at someone with arthritis I like to remind people again of the differential diagnosis of various forms of arthritis. Acute monoarticular arthritis, differentials including in front of you, but the main things that we talked about before, trauma, crystal disease and bacterial diseases in septic arthritis. But there’s a whole host of other things that can cause a monoarticular arthritis. Acute polyarticular arthritis. Infection-related types of arthritis, occasionally sepsis. Very unusual to have a polyarticular arthritic. GC is a

We talked before about that polyarticular presentation that would eventually settle into a joint. Lyme disease can present as polyarticular disease, so again it’s more commonly monoarticular. Rheumatic fever, HIV and other viral infections can cause arthritides. Non-infectious causes; again, a whole host of rheumatologic diseases, vasculitides, sarcoid

So there is a whole differential whenever we have people who present with arthritis and because of this, how to help differentiate the different kinds of arthritis, the American College of Rheumatology came up with these criteria for RA. And these are the criteria that have been most recently adopted by the ACR and it requires four of the following: a.m. stiffness lasting more than an hour, swelling in three or more joints - and when we are talking about joints, two MCP joints actually counts as one joint so you should think of it more as joint regions - swelling in hand joints and

Rheumatoid factors - we talked about these - are identical things that we talked about the other day. A whole host of reasons people can have positive rheumatoid factors. Normal healthy people, both small percentage of young

Rheumatoid arthritis, believe it or not, seems to be a fairly new disease in our history. We don’t have any real skeletal evidence of rheumatoid arthritis from ancient times, like we do ankylosing spondylitis, various degenerative processes. We’ve got skeletal remains from Egyptian times for things like ankylosing spondylitis but we 

Incidence of RA is a lot harder to identify and some of the best places, the best sources, for determining the incidence of RA have been like at the Rochester Epidemiologic Project. If you look at a lot of these epidemiologic studies and various journals, they all say "From the population of Ohlmstead County." I’m sure you’ve all seen that a number of times. They have a very wonderful database because of the limited number of places you can get medical care in that county where the Mayo Clinic is. All of their database is from doctors offices and the hospital, who are all computerized in the central system, and so if someone wants to go back and research those patients they are able to dig through the patient’s entire history and try and make sense of it. So you have the most complete data we have anywhere, longitudinally. From their database, which is primarily a Caucasian database, about 2-4 per

Again, genetics has been looked at extensively and we are learning more and more about the genetics. These genes that I learned about in medical school as being predisposing to certain things or being a higher incidence in certain diseases, we are actually now finding out what they are. Many of these code for the particular part of the protein on the MHC molecules. So it has a lot to do with the way our immune system interacts with itself. Again, despite the

A thing that has become much more apparent, and seemingly more important over the past couple of decades, is to understand this problem; morbidity and mortality in RA. It used to be thought years ago that RA was a pretty benign disease and that if people were followed over a period of time, in a significant percentage of them it just sort of went away and most people had fairly well controlled RA with very moderate treatment. We are not finding that to be true. Certainly we know that certain things are predictors of higher morbidity and mortality. People with more

Another thing I wanted to point out is that sometimes in older men, they don’t seem to have really really pronounced synovitis but they do have a lot of stiffness and the NSAID’s aren’t very helpful. Most of these people just require low dose steroids and they do very well with that.

Well, the diagnosis of the rheumatoid arthritis; we talked about the criteria a little bit ago. Again, history and physical. You look for the symmetric polyarthritis that has been present for six weeks or longer. Tenderness, swelling, warmth, decreased range of motion, etc. Look for rheumatoid nodules. Occasionally you’ll see low grade fevers. In the laboratory evaluation often you will see anemia, it is not uncommon for patients with RA to have hemoglobins of 9 and 10. They very often have an elevated ESR and this does tend to correlate to some degree with their activity of disease. Rheumatoid factor positivity between 60-90%. Synovial fluid though, I don’t tend to do a lot of synovial fluid analyses on people who present with diffuse polyarticular arthritis. It is classically a class II fluid. One of those things I remember back from residency days, like the pleural fluid in rheumatoid arthritis, patients tend to have real low glucose and you always had to remember to distinguish that between septic empyemas. Likewise in rheumatoid arthritis joints, people tend to have very low glucose as well. X-ray findings, periarticular osteopenia, the loss of cortical white line. If you look very closely at the outline of say the distal end of the metacarpal bones, they tend to have this little white line around the edge of the bone and that tends to disappear, and for a really sharp radiologist it’s an early sign of RA. Certainly soft tissue swelling, joint space narrowing and eventually erosive disease are potential findings. There is our RA criteria again, just to remind again, these are criteria that are helpful to you to identify them. You don’t live and die by them, but the key thing is remember six weeks or longer.

There is a significant differential diagnosis. That’s why I put the criteria up again. There’s a lot of other etiologies. Always consider seronegative spondyloarthropathies and other rheumatic diseases, but occasionally we get fooled by other disorders; gout, spontaneous bacterial endocarditis, sarcoid, thyroid disease. Remember that from the other day. I’m going to say it again, thyroid disease. Interestingly enough, steroid withdrawal. How many of you have seen patients with sort of pseudo-rheumatism from steroid withdrawal? A number of you. I think it’s important to distinguish what this steroid withdrawal typically causes. If we are going to blame this on steroids, have some sort of concept of what steroid withdrawal can do. Almost anybody who is on a significant dose of steroids for a period of time, when you lower their steroids they can have this pseudo-rheumatism. These joint aches and pains. The key thing is that when you reduce their steroids it shouldn’t be something that lasts three weeks from the steroid withdrawal. Classically, that will go away or abate after three to five to seven days. So sometimes when you have those patients that you are really struggling to taper their steroids and they have that little bit of increased activity, if you can get them to sit tight for a few days it may help you to distinguish between steroid withdrawal and actual exacerbation of their underlying symptoms. A lot of our patients, particularly RA patients, are very sensitive to the steroid decreases and unfortunately our reflex, when something gets a little more symptomatic, is to kick them right back up.

RA is a disease that has obviously many bouts. They tend to have exacerbations, remissions, almost any joint of the body can be involved. We’ll go sort of head to toe and talk about various joints. First of all, we saw some pictures of the cervical spine on Monday and the big concern is the atlantoaxial subluxation or instability due to active synovitis. When that happens people will often develop various neurologic symptoms. Usually this sort of dysesthesia that radiates down their spine, but they can develop a number of other problems, from frank spinal cord symptoms of incontinence, or spinal cord compression signs of sensorimotor abnormalities, to these more vague things like, "Gosh my head just feels like it’s coming off." Or, "I just don’t feel like myself." The TMJ are involved very

The hands and wrists, I think, are probably some of the most significant … have some of the most significant findings. Early on in RA the first joints that tend to be involved are the wrist areas. One of the earliest signs sometimes is right at the radiocarpal joint and the ulnocarpal joints. You get a lot of laxity in there and the wrist will start to sublux a little bit to the volar direction. And they get a very prominent ulnar head there. Sometimes it gets very loose and you actually can push it up and down. It’s called the piano key sign. You push that ulnar head down

Hip involvement. We showed pictures the other day of that protrusio acetabuli knee. He got involved very significantly. Got a lot of quadriceps atrophy due to the inflammation and lack of use. They get flexion contractures, can develop Baker’s cysts just like osteoarthritis patients can. Ankle and foot involvement can be quite severe and some of the most disabling problems can be in the feet, because people have a hard time getting around. But eversion and pronation of the ankle tend to cause a lot of difficulties with walking and they have a lot of problems

Ocular involvement, again people can get dry eyes, dry mouth, secondary Sjogren’s syndrome. The biggest concern in RA is this episcleritis, classically with the women with long standing severe RA. The episcleritis people will present with acute red eye, often is recurrent. It often is painful. Scleritis is very painful and people can develop scleral thinning and there is a risk of perforation. This is a person with episcleritis and you can see the red eye. People with scleritis - and you can see how severe this has gotten where they’ve got scleral thinning -this person is at risk of perforation and at this point I’m not sure how salvageable that eye is going to be. But this is obviously what we want to prevent. And anybody with any significant redness in their eyes needs ophthalmologic evaluation.

There are several features that indicate a poor prognosis in RA. People with an insidious onset tend to have a poor prognosis, large joint involvement, high rheumatoid factor positivity, rheumatoid nodules and vasculitis, persistently elevated sed rates, all are bad prognostic features. We have to weigh these in our minds a little bit when we are deciding about therapy.