Rheumatoid Arthritis on the Rise in White Women

After decades of decline, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is on the rise among white women in the US, according to a Reuters Health article based on study by researchers at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota.

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REUTERS ARTICLE

Apr 01, 2010 9:18 AM - In their study, researchers used data from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, which has been tracking medical records from health care providers in Olmstead County, Minnesota, since the early 1900s and has been funded by the National Institutes of Health for more than 40 years. The project includes information on virtually everyone who has sought medical care in the county for the past several decades.

The researchers had previously analyzed data for the period 1955 to 1994, which showed a steady decline in cases of RA for both men and women. In the current analysis, of data from 1995 to 2007, they identified 466 people with a confirmed diagnosis of the disease.

During that time, the researchers found, RA risk held steady for men, with about 28 men diagnosed annually for every 100,000 men in the general population. But for women, there was a slight increase in incidence of 2.5% per year between 1995 and 2007, with an average annual incidence of 53 diagnoses per 100,000 women for the entire time period. The actual percentage of women with RA in the county rose from about three-quarters of a percent in 1995 to nearly 1% in 2005; for men, fewer than 0.5% had RA at both time points.

While the study wasn't designed to investigate why this is happening, the speed of the change points to environmental, rather than genetic, factors, says Sherine E. Gabriel, MD, one of the study's authors. Environmental factors could include a slow drop in smoking among women in recent years, changing composition of oral contraceptives, which have been shown to protect women against RA; and vitamin D deficiency, which has been on the rise in recent years, says the article.

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