Cardiovascular Risk Still Higher with RA in Modern Treatment Era

The results "suggest that despite improved RA disease control and increasing recognition of cardiovascular risks in RA over time, the gap in risk between patients with RA and the general population remains, at least among patients with seropositive RA," they added. In a nationwide population-based cohort study, patients with new-onset RA, defined as an RA diagnosis within 12 months of patient-reported onset of symptoms, were identified between 1997 and 2014 from the Swedish Rheumatology Quality Register. For each unique patient with RA, up to five individuals from the Swedish Population Register were randomly selected, matched on sex, year of birth, and residential area. Persons with a history of ACS at the start of follow-up were excluded, leaving 15,744 RA patients and 70,899 comparators for the analysis. Sixty-nine percent in the analysis were women with a mean age of 57 years. https://www.medpagetoday.com/Rheumatology/Arthritis/66813?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2017-07-24&eun=g721819d0r&pos=3