Monday, 12 September 2016

Cardiovascular Risk in Rheumatoid Arthritis. An Update for General Practitioners

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic inflammatory joint pathology which affects almost 1% of the general population and which is ranked among the top 15% of diseasescausing major disability worldwide. RA shares several pathophysiologicfeatures, genetic predisposition and risk factors with atherosclerosis. Inflammation is the central pathologic factor in both diseases. The paper reviews cardiovascular events and their therapy in RA.


Rheumatoid Arthritis
Methodology:
A review must rely on solid data, be objective and deliver the ‘state of the art’ of the argument. The quest is a seemingly endless process. Writing is a solitary endeavor but data depend on the work of many individuals and institutions. We started a goal-oriented search in English and German with the engines BioMedSearch.com, Cardio source, Center Watch, ClinicalTrials.gov, Cochrane, Google Scholar, Med Watch, Research Gate and PubMed. We settled a time-window 2000-2016 with key words: RA, arthritis, cardiovascular risk in RA, and treatment of RA. Our search delivered more than 1 million of references. The filter was restricted to guidelines and meta-analyses. This search delivered more than 80,000 references. Using a plagiarism’s software we found that few centers published more than 60% of the collected references, usually changing authors’ order, deleting or adding some authors. Many papers present strikingly similar data. 

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