Medical News: High Mortality with Lung Disease in RA – in Rheumatology, Arthritis from MedPage Today

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who develop interstitial lung disease face a very high mortality risk, a population-based study found.

The risk of death for RA patients who develop interstitial lung disease was nearly triple compared with patients without pulmonary involvement (HR 2.86, 95% CI 1.98 to 4.12), according to Tim Bongartz, MD, and colleagues from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

And median survival of RA patients after a diagnosis of interstitial lung disease was only 2.6 years, considerably lower than the expected survival of 9.9 years for RA patients of the same age and sex without lung disease (P<0.001), the researchers reported in the June issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism.