Predicting the development of rheumatoid arthritis in patients with recent-onset undifferentiated arthritis

摘要

Evaluation of: van der Helm-van Mil AH, Detert J, le Cessie S et al.: Validation of a prediction rule for disease outcome in patients with recent-onset undifferentiated arthritis, moving toward individualized treatment decision-making. Arthritis Rheum. 58(8), 2241–2247 (2008). The decision to start disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs in patients with undifferentiated arthritis (UA) is not always easy, as the natural disease progression is variable. Van der Helm-van Mil and colleagues have recently developed a prediction rule to estimate the chance of progression to rheumatoid arthritis in individual patients presenting with early UA. In this study, the prediction score was calculated and validated in three independent cohorts of patients with UA, and has been shown to have a good discriminative ability for assessing the likelihood of progression to rheumatoid arthritis in approximately 75% of individual patients with recent-onset UA.