Original articleCorrelation Between Dry Eye and Rheumatoid Arthritis Activity
Section snippets
Methods
This study was a prospective case-control study. During October 2003 to November 2003, we examined 72 RA patients (five men and 67 women) at the Department of Joint Disease and Rheumatism, Nippon Medical School. We excluded patients who had any other ocular surface disease besides dry eye. The mean ± SD patient age was 64.0 ± 11.6 years (range 30 to 85 years). RA was diagnosed according to the American Rheumatism Association 1987 revised criteria for the classification of RA.11 Eleven patients
Results
We examined the percentage of RA patients with SS, dry eye, or both (Table 1). According to the Japanese criteria for SS, 10% of RA patients were diagnosed with SS. According to the Japanese criteria for dry eye, 92% of RA patients developed dry eye, including probable dry eye. Even in the non-SS group, 90% of patients were diagnosed with dry eye. The profiles of SS and non-SS patients are listed in Table 2. The difference in the age and sex of the members of these two groups was not
Discussion
Because one of the purposes of this study was to identify dry eye in ordinary RA patients, we examined patients who visited the department of rheumatology for rheumatic treatment and not patients who visited the ophthalmology department with ophthalmic symptoms. The reported incidence of dry eye in the normal population is generally 5% to 17%,16, 17, 18 but its incidence in RA patients is higher (19% to 31%).8, 9, 19, 20 In this study, the incidence of dry eye in RA patients (47%) was similar
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See accompanying Editorial on page 898.
M.F. and T.I. contributed equally to this work.