We read with interest the recent article by Hülsemann and Zeidler,1 in which the 1987 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) classification criteria for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) were evaluated for their ability to identify patients with a clinical diagnosis of RA among 217 patients referred to an early arthritis clinic. The authors concluded that the 1987 ACR criteria can be used to make a diagnosis of RA in this setting.

In this study, the “gold standard” against which the criteria were tested was an “expert diagnosis” made by one of the authors when the patient was first seen (within one year of symptom onset). However, the main difficulty facing the rheumatologist for patients with early disease is that patients who ultimately develop RA appear clinically similar to those who have self limiting disease or other forms of inflammatory arthritis. It is therefore too early to make an accurate diagnosis at this stage. More importantly, RA is a heterogeneous disease with a prognosis which varies from complete symptom remission to severe disability. Therefore simply categorising patients into those who do and do not have “RA” is not necessarily important when considering which patients require early treatment. Although the authors made a clinical diagnosis without using the classification criteria, it is likely that the diagnoses were informed by their knowledge of the individual components of the criteria. Therefore the high sensitivity (90%) they reported means that most of the patients with a clinical diagnosis of RA will have had seropositive, erosive, polyarticular disease with hand involvement. Whereas we have no problem in recognising these patients as having RA, it represents only one end of the spectrum. The proportion of patients with “undifferentiated arthritis” in this …