Arthritis Symptoms Worse in African Americans

[The Straight Story]

Arthritis Symptoms Worse in African Americans
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Reuters Health

By Anne Harding

Friday, April 29, 2005

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - African Americans with rheumatoid arthritis report more severe disease and more disability than whites with the disease, a new study shows.

"Clinicians have to recognize that the severity of disease with rheumatoid arthritis in our culture in 2005 tends to be worse in African Americans. First of all we need to recognize that, and second we need to think about what we can do to improve that," Dr. Richard Brasington of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health.

Given the lower scores on a self sufficiency test among African American study participants compared with whites, Brasington and his colleagues note, strategies to improve physical function, such as the Arthritis Foundation's Arthritis Self Help Course, could be particularly beneficial for these patients.

Studies have shown that disease activity in patients with lupus and scleroderma is more severe in African Americans, the researches note in their report, published in the Journal of Rheumatology. To investigate whether race might play a role in rheumatoid arthritis severity, they looked at 100 outpatients with the disease. Thirty-three of the study participants were African-American and the rest were Caucasian.

The average Health Assessment Questionnaire score for the African Americans was 1.5, compared to 0.9 for the Caucasians. Mean Disease Activity Scores were 5.5 for blacks and 4.3 for whites. And pain perception scores and number of tender joints were nearly double for blacks compared with whites.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_24387.html

[Igel]

1. And the most important line in the article ...

"After adjusting the data for the possible effects of socioeconomic factors, the researchers found that race was no longer independently associated with rheumatoid arthritis disease severity."