Early symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis can include bodily pain and weakness. But after weeks or months, you may develop other symptoms such as joint swelling. Symptoms may vary from person to person.
Early rheumatoid arthritis tends to affect your smaller joints first — particularly the joints that attach your fingers to your hands and your toes to your feet. As the disease progresses, symptoms often spread to the wrists, knees, ankles, elbows, hips, and shoulders. In most cases, symptoms occur in the same joints on both sides of your body.
The signs and symptoms of RA typically begin when someone reaches the age of 30, though it can take until a person is in their 60s to fully develop. Cigarette smoking can increase the risk of a person developing RA by as much as 2.4%.
RA that starts after age 60 is called late-onset RA. It tends to be less severe but can affect larger joints like your shoulders. Joint pain, swelling, tenderness, stiffness, redness, and warmth are all ways in which RA affects the joints.
How Rheumatoid Arthritis Is Diagnosed: Average Onset
Most people have symptoms of RA between ages 30 and 60, but men are unlikely to be diagnosed under age 45. Across both men and women, the median age of onset is 58. RA can be categorized as young-onset rheumatoid arthritis (YORA) and later-onset rheumatoid arthritis (LORA).
If RA develops in adults aged 65 or younger, doctors refer to it as early onset RA. When RA develops in individuals over the age of 65, doctors refer to it as elderly onset RA (EORA).
The typical age range for RA diagnosis is between 30 and 50. Before 30, it’s considered early onset. In RA, your immune system attacks healthy cells in your body by mistake. Symptoms can present in a subtle way and worsen slowly over weeks or months, or they can occur very quickly. Onset can be categorized in several ways, with two being:
Rheumatoid arthritis, or RA, is an autoimmune and inflammatory disease, which means that your immune system attacks healthy cells in your body by mistake, causing inflammation (painful swelling) in the affected parts of the body. RA mainly attacks the joints, usually many joints at once. RA commonly affects joints in the hands, wrists, and knees.
For more detailed information, visit Healthline, Mayo Clinic, Rheumatoid Arthritis.org, or Verywell Health for further reading.
