TOPLINE:

In patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the presence of multiple chronic conditions was associated with an increased likelihood of disease flare and reduced odds of achieving remission.

METHODOLOGY:

Researchers conducted a retrospective, population-based study to investigate how multiple chronic conditions and adverse social determinants of health influence disease activity in patients with RA.

They analyzed the data of 659 patients with incident RA diagnosed between January 1999 and December 2014 (median age, 55.3 years; 69.7% women); each participant was required to have complete medical history of at least 1 year.

A list of 55 chronic medical conditions was used to identify multimorbidity (two or more conditions) and substantial multimorbidity (five or more conditions)

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