To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the prevalence of low bone density in African-American patients with RA (including patients with either early or established disease). Depending on the race/ethnicity of the reference population used, we found that approximately one-third to half of patients were osteopenic or worse, and 5-16% were osteoporotic [...]

Patient Characteristics
Characteristics of the 175 study participants are summarized in Table 2. Study participants had a mean age of 51 ± 13 years and were predominantly women (n=144, 82%). Patients had a mean RA disease duration of 14 ± 7 months and a substantial majority of participants (n=145, 83%) had received prior treatment with oral [...]

Patients
Participants were enrollees in the Consortium for the Longitudinal Evaluation of African Americans with Early Rheumatoid Arthritis (CLEAR). Eligible participants self-reported African-American ethnicity, had an established diagnosis of RA as defined by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) classification criteria and had <2 years of disease duration (from time of symptom onset). All patients underwent [...]

INTRODUCTION
Osteoporosis (Generic Fosamax is taken for the prevention or treatment of osteoporosis) is increasingly recognized to represent a major source of morbidity for patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Although the availability of dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) represents a major advance in osteoporosis care in the context of RA, fracture risk assessment in non-Caucasians remains [...]

The clinical course of RA is variable and its prognosis difficult to predict. In many patients, the disease process is severe and results in progressive joint destruction and serious disabilities. At all stages of RA, disease activity has a crucial role in disability. The importance of anti-CCP in both the diagnosis and the prognosis of [...]

We analyzed data from 76 RA patients and 83 controls. The two groups were similar with respect to percentages of female gender (88% and 90% for patient and control groups, respectively) and mean ages (53.0 ± 10.8 and 54.1 ± 11.3 years, respectively). The most common treatments received by RA patients were chloroquine, methotrexate 2,5 [...]

Patients
In this cross-sectional study, two groups were compared: 76 RA patients, according to the RA criteria revised by the ACR in 1987, with disease duration of more than two years, admitted to our outpatient rheumatology clinics consequently were included in the patient group. All patients underwent complete clinical evaluation by the same physician (NS) and [...]