Article Text
Correspondence
Mortality in rheumatoid arthritis patients
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The paper “Mortality in rheumatoid arthritis patients with disease onset in the 1980s” is of considerable interest.1 A decrease in mortality risk for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients in more recent years would be important, even if only in the first 10 years of RA. However, this inception cohort differs from those previously published so that no direct comparison is possible. As earlier (and older and larger) studies have shown standardised mortality ratios of two to three, a finding of “normal” mortality might imply that more recently used treatment strategies are reversing the excessive mortality in RA previously observed.
Yet, even at first perusal, there are a lot of deaths in this series of relatively young people. …