EDITORIAL
Rheumatoid arthritis
To be in remission or not: is that the question?
Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Department of Rheumatology, PO Box 9101, NL-6500HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor P L C M van Riel
p.vanriel@reuma.umcn.nl
Monitoring disease activity regularly is preferable to classification as remission at one point in time
Keywords: remission; DAS28; rheumatoid arthritis; early rheumatoid arthritis
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The goal of the management of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is to suppress disease activity as much as possible, to prevent loss of function, and to prevent or control joint damage.1 As for most chronic diseases, cure—meaning complete disappearance of all signs and symptoms which persist after stopping treatment—occurs only seldomly. Therefore often the term "remission" is used to define a state which approaches cure as closely as possible. However, remission in RA is not clearly defined, and might, alternatively, be understood to be absence of disease activity, absence of measurable disease activity, or very low disease activity, probably without clinical consequences like progressive damage to the joints or functional loss.2 For the assessment of remission of disease activity in RA, disease activity is probably best regarded as a continuum, and remission can be seen as a state at the very end of it.
"Disease activity is a continuum. . . [Full text of this article]
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