You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 70, Issue 12
  • Determination of smoking status of rheumatoid arthritis patients by means of a self-reported questionnaire and serum cotinine assay: a cross-sectional study

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Letters
Determination of smoking status of rheumatoid arthritis patients by means of a self-reported questionnaire and serum cotinine assay: a cross-sectional study
  1. Kamran Naraghi1,
  2. Mark Booth2,
  3. Andrew J Russell3,
  4. Jacob M van Laar1,4
  1. 1Rheumatology Department, The James Cook University Hospital, Middlesbrough, UK
  2. 2Wolfson Research Institute, Queen's Campus, Durham University, Thornaby, UK
  3. 3Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, UK
  4. 4Middlesbrough & Institute of Cellular Medicine, Newcastle University, Middlesbrough, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Kamran Naraghi, Clinical Trials Doctor, Rheumatology Department, The James Cook University Hospital, Marton Road, Middlesbrough TS4 3BW, UK; kamran.naraghi{at}stees.nhs.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/ard.2011.151118

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is characterised by a chronic, destructive and debilitating arthritis.1 Smoking may adversely influence the severity of RA as well as its response to treatment in a dose-dependent manner.1,–,4 Furthermore, the link between passive smoking and RA has been suggested by some researchers.5 Self-reporting is commonly used to identify the smoking status of RA patients. In the general population, self-reporting underestimates the true rate of smoking.6 7 To what extent this issue affects RA patients in particular is unreported. Unless we correctly ascertain RA patients in terms of smoking status, it will remain difficult to investigate the true impact of smoking, or smoking cessation, on signs and symptoms associated with the disease.

    To address this issue, we recently determined the smoking status of RA patients attending the Rheumatology Department of a large university …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Funding This study was funded by the Research and Development Department, South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the James Cook University Hospital.

    • Competing interests None.

    • Ethics approval This study was conducted with the approval of the Newcastle and North Tyneside 2 Research Ethics Committee.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.