Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory disorder that can affect more than just your joints. In some people, the condition can damage a wide variety of body systems, including the skin, eyes, lungs, heart, and blood vessels.
RA and the Joints: RA is an autoimmune disorder, which means that the disorder occurs when immune cells mistakenly begin to attack the body’s normal cells. Specifically, in RA, the body attacks its own healthy joint tissue, called the synovial membrane or synovium.
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, and commonly affects joints in the hands, wrists, and knees.
Rheumatoid arthritis and gout are both types of painful arthritis. Gout symptoms include intense pain, redness, stiffness, swelling, and warmth in your big toe or other joints, with uric acid crystals causing the inflammation. Conversely, in rheumatoid arthritis, it’s the immune system that causes joint damage.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic autoimmune disease characterized by inflammatory arthritis and extra-articular involvement. It is a chronic inflammatory disorder caused, in many cases, by the interaction between genes and environmental factors, including tobacco, and primarily involves synovial joints.
Overview of Osteoarthritis vs. Rheumatoid Arthritis: Arthritis is the swelling and tenderness of one or more joints. The main symptoms of arthritis are joint pain and stiffness, which typically worsen with age. The most common types of arthritis are osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis.
Español Key Facts: In 2019, 18 million people worldwide were living with rheumatoid arthritis. About 70% of people living with rheumatoid arthritis are women, and 55% are older than 55 years. 13 million people with rheumatoid arthritis experience severity levels (moderate or severe) that could benefit from rehabilitation.
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a long-term (chronic) disease that causes inflammation of the joints. The inflammation can be so severe that it affects how the joints and other parts of the body look and function. In the hand, RA may cause deformities in the joints of the fingers, making moving your hands difficult.
For more detailed information on symptoms and causes, you can visit the Mayo Clinic, gather insights about RA causes at RheumatoidArthritis.org, explore the disease basics on the CDC, understand the FAQs on Cleveland Clinic, review the scientific details at NCBI Bookshelf, get an overview from Mayo Clinic on arthritis, read the global perspective by the World Health Organization (WHO), and learn more from Johns Hopkins Medicine.
