Rheumatoid arthritis patients have not experienced a decline in mortality, despite dramatically increased life expectancy in the general population and newer, more aggressive arthritis treatments.
This stagnation is contributing to a widening mortality gap between patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and their unaffected counterparts in the general population, whose mortality has significantly decreased since the 1950s.
In a population-based incidence cohort study, Dr. Hilal Maradit Kremers and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., looked at a total of 822 RA patients—all of whom were adult residents of Rochester in whom RA was first diagnosed between 1955 and 1995 and all adult residents of Olmsted County in whom RA was diagnosed between 1995 and 2000.
The patients were followed up through medical records until their death or Jan. 1, 2007. The mean age at incidence at 58 years, and nearly three-quarters of the patients were women. The median length of follow-up was 11.7 years (Arthritis Rheum. 2007;56:3583–7).
RA patients' mortality was unchanged in each of the five periods looked at in the study: from 1955 to 1964, 1965 to 1974, 1975 to 1984, 1985 to 1994, and 1995 to 2000. Female mortality hovered around 2.4 per 100 person-years for each period, and the male mortality was constant at about 2.5 per 100 person-years.
In sharp contrast, mortality in women in the Minnesota general population declined from 1.0 per 100 person-years in 1965 to 0.2 per 100 person-years in 2000.
For men, the rate went from 1.2 to 0.3 per 100 person-years over the same time period.
Dr. Kremers reported no conflicts of interest in relation to this study.