© 2002 Occupational and Environmental Medicine
ECHO
Working to reduce work disability in rheumatoid arthritis
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
A study of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) may point the way towards better treatment, thereby allowing them to stay in work longer. By identifying predictors of loss of paid work early in the course of the disease the study paves the way for management programmes better suited to facilitating coping at work—with alternatives to using drugs to control the condition—before work disability sets in.
Forty per cent of the 353 recruits working at entry to the study were not working five years later, over half (56%) because of RA. Work disability was more likely with manual work (odds ratio 2.97, 95% confidence interval 1.26 to 6.9), joint erosions (2.09, 1.19 to 3.64), high erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) (2.37, 1.4 to 3.9), and worse baseline scores for the disability index of the Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ 
1.5; 2.26, 1.38 to 3.7). With HAQ score, ESR, age of onset of RA,
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