Issue Date: April 19, 2009
Rheumatoid "heart-thritis"?
Those with RA must monitor heart health carefully.
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RA sufferers have an increased risk of heart attack.
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According to the Arthritis Foundation, roughly 1.3 million people suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, also called RA. It involves painful, swollen joints, but two recent studies suggest that RA sufferers also are at increased risk for heart disease.
Researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., compared 149 people with RA with 1,405 folks without the disease. The RA sufferers were more likely to have diastolic dysfunction, a condition that limits how effectively blood flows through the heart. The study wasn't designed to determine whether RA caused diastolic dysfunction, but it observed that an association was present.
Swedish researchers followed 7,954 people newly diagnosed with RA and 38,913 control subjects for 10 years. During that time, they found that participants with the disease had nearly twice the number of heart attacks and deaths from heart attacks. These findings suggest that the onset of RA brings on inflammatory changes that can lead to increased heart disease risk in fairly short order.
If you have RA, just remember that it's not only your joints that need to be monitored, but also your heart.
Tedd Mitchell, M.D., president and CEO of Dallas' Cooper Clinic, writes HealthSmart every week.
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