Rheumatoid arthritis in elderly patients

Abstract

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), which affects about 1% of the adult population mostly in old age, has specific clinical features at the onset in elderly and senile people. The paper describes two clinical cases that are demonstrative as the rare variant of RA onset at old age (86 years). In one case, the female patient was observed to have an acute onset, polyarthritis with sharp pains, obvious exudative phenomena, with significant functional limitation, and a relatively rapid course of the pathological process with high immunological activity. The other patient showed, on the contrary, a gradual onset of the disease with the minimal clinical and immunological manifestations and a rapid progressive joint destruction. Both patients were found to have several concomitant diseases, which corresponds to the comorbidity data given by different authors in elderly patients, including those with RA. The specific feature of the described clinical cases is the disease onset at 86 years; therefore during hospitalization, there was a differential diagnosis of articular syndrome in the presence of this age-related cancer that was ruled out by examination.