Rheumatologists, take heart! We may be doing something right 英文参考文献.docVIP

Available online /content/10/2/105 Editorial Rheumatologists, take heart! We may be doing something right Ronald F van Vollenhoven Rheumatology Unit, the Karolinska Institute, Department of Rheumatology, The Karolinska University Hospital, Reumatologen D2-1, 17176 Stockholm, Sweden Corresponding author: Ronald F van Vollenhoven, Ronald.van.Vollenhoven@ki.se Published: 7 March 2008 Arthritis Research Therapy 2008, 10:105 (doi:10.1186/ar2364) This article is online at /content/10/2/105 ? 2008 BioMed Central Ltd See related research by Naranjo et al., /content/10/2/R30 Abstract hypertension, smoking (ever), diabetes, and hyperlipidemia were all significantly associated with the risk for In the present issue of Arthritis Research Therapy data are presented suggesting that antirheumatic therapies decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. The QUEST-RA group, a large international collaboration, analyzed data on 4,363 patients in a cross-sectional manner. Traditional risk factors were all significantly associated with cardiovascular events, and the presence of extraarticular disease significantly increased the risk, confirming a previous publication. The most interesting analysis in this study suggests that effective antirheumatic treat- cardiovascular events. A more interesting finding was that the presence of extraarticular disease clearly increased the risk of cardiovascular events, confirming a previous publication by Turesson and colleagues [2]. The real importance of this study, however, may lie in the final analysis, presented in Table 5 of their paper, which intends to determine to what extent antirheumatic treatment modulates the risk of cardiovascular disease [1]. To achieve this, the authors collected data from the physicians on the treatments (glucocorticoids, conventional disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs [DMARDs],