Conventional measures of disease activity, such as swollen joints, do not appear to be associated with fatigue in rheumatoid arthritis, according to a study that examined fatigue assessments from more than 16,000 rheumatoid arthritis patients in the U.S.
Reports of fatigue were closely associated with patient-measures of pain. But fatigue was weakly associated with clinical measures of inflammation such as sedimentation rate, joint swelling, joint tenderness, and physician-reported global assessment, Dr. Martin J. Bergman said at the annual European Congress of Rheumatology.
The results are not meant to downplay the impact of fatigue in RA patients, he said. Fatigue is a common and devastating complaint for many patients with RA, said Dr. Bergman, a Philadelphia-area rheumatologist.
In addition to examining levels of fatigue among RA patients, the researchers collected data on reported fatigue from about 3,500 patients with fibromyalgia and 4,600 patients with osteoarthritis. As with the patients with RA, these other patients were asked to rate their problems with “unusual fatigue” over the past week on a scale of 0-10.
The findings show that fatigue was common not only in fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis but also in patients with osteoarthritis.