Scientists study impact of rheumatoid arthritis on heart risk

A new study has confirmed that people with rheumatoid arthritis face a significantly heightened risk of heart disease.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease in which the joints of the body become inflamed.

More than 350,000 people in the UK have the disease and it has recently become apparent that there is an association between rheumatoid arthritis and heart disease, as patients are more likely to have a heart attack or stroke than the general population.

In order to investigate this association, researchers at the VU Medical Centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, assessed the incidence of cardiovascular disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis compared with the general population, and with patients with type-2 diabetes - a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

They analysed data on 353 people with rheumatoid arthritis and a further 1,852 members of the public, 155 of whom had been diagnosed with type-2 diabetes.

After three years, nine per cent of the rheumatoid arthritis patients had developed cardiovascular disease, compared with just 4.3 per cent of the general population.

Overall, people with rheumatoid arthritis were found to be 1.94 times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease than people without the autoimmune disease.

Furthermore, the risk of developing cardiovascular disease was found to be of a similar magnitude to that of patients with type-2 diabetes.

Writing in the journal Arthritis Care & Research, the study authors revealed: "The risk of cardiovascular disease in rheumatoid arthritis was significantly elevated compared with the general population, and comparable with the magnitude of risk in type-2 diabetes."

The Arthritis Research Campaign is currently running a £1million trial with the British Heart Foundation to find out if giving rheumatoid arthritis patients cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins reduces the risk of death due to cardiovascular disease.

© Adfero Ltd

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