About Rheumatoid Arthritis

A recent study has shown that the use of a combination of a tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitor along with methotrexate therapy in people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) was associated with a reduction in heart attack risk of 80 percent compared with patients using methotrexate alone, according to research presented recently at the American College of Rheumatology Annual Scientific Meeting in Boston, Mass.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic, systemic, autoimmune disease that not only causes pain, stiffness, swelling, and limitation of function in joints, but also damages internal organs as well.
Approximately, 2.1 million Americans are afflicted with RA, most of them women. As mentioned above, while joints are the principal areas affected by RA, inflammation can develop in other organs as well. Heart attacks, resulting from inflammation of the coronary vessels, are more common in RA sufferers.
Researchers recently studied the risk of heart attack in patients using a TNF-inhibitor (a drug that blocks cytokines and can turn off the chronic inflammation that causes destruction in RA), methotrexate (a drug used to treat RA by blocking the metabolism of cells) and other disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs), which are a category of drugs used in RA to slow down the disease progression, […]

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