Rheumatoid arthritis patients 'more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes'

New research has confirmed that people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are far more likely to suffer from cardiovascular (CV) events such as heart attack and stroke than healthy controls.

The study by a team from the Mayo Clinic in the US published its research in the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.

During the trial, the researchers monitored a group of patients with RA and a set of healthy controls over a period of ten years.

It was discovered that the RA patients' CV risk was similar to healthy controls that were between five and ten years older. In RA patients who were aged between 60 and 69, the risk of CV over the ten-year period was found to be 16.8 per cent.

However, this was shown to more than triple to 60.4 per cent if the RA patient had other risk factors such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes and obesity. Smoking was also associated with a significant rise in CV risk.

As a result, Dr Sherine Gabriel and the rest of the team concluded: "More than half of the newly diagnosed RA patients who were 50 to 59 years of age and all of those [older than] 60 … had a [greater than] ten per cent risk of CV disease within ten years of their RA incidence and should be targeted for specific CV risk reduction strategies tailored to their personal risk profiles."

A spokesman for the Arthritis Research Campaign said that greater awareness should be focused on the CV risk of RA patients, so that they could then take steps to minimise that risk.

The charity is taking steps to warn people about the risks so that they can make the necessary lifestyle changes such as stopping smoking, losing weight, eating more healthily, and taking drugs such as aspirin or statins to lower their blood pressure or cholesterol. It is carrying out a research project which will develop and evaluate new educational material to be made widely available to patients.

The Arthritis Research Campaign is also co-funding a major multi-centre trial to test the effectiveness of cholesterol-lowering drugs, statins, on RA patients.

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