Characteristicsof Patients with Reactive Arthritis from the National Register of Rheumatic Diseases

Overview

Introduction .
The paper contains information on a group of patients with reactive arthritis whichis one of the subgroups in the National register of rheumatic diseases.Objectives .1.Analysis ofdemographic data,clinical picture and treatment of patients.2.Analysis of relations between thetype of triggering infection and these parameters,sex,clinical picture,presence of HLA-B27 antigenand therapy.3.Evaluation whether therapy of patients in the investigated group is consistent withrecommendations in the literature.Methods .62 patients were included who met the criteria forreactive arthritis suggested at the 3rd international session on reactive arthritis in Berlin in 1995.In the recording in the register participated several rheumatologists from different Czech andMoravian regions.The enlistment took place from 1999 to 2001 incl.The assembled demographicdata,data on the clinical picture,therapy and the presence of HLA-B27 were evaluated by statisticalmethods.Furthermore relations between the triggering infections and the investigated parameters(sex,clinical picture,the presence of HLA-B27 antigen and therapy)were evaluated by statisticalmethods.For statistical evaluation programme Statistica and MS Excel were used.Nominal varia-bles and differences between groups were evaluated by means of contingency tables and the χ 2 testor Fisher ’s exact test.Results .The authors did not find in the group a statistically significantdifference in the incidence of urogenital reactive arthritis in relation to sex.A statistically signifi-cant difference was found between the incidence of postenteric reactive arthritis between sexes with a predominance of men (78.6 %).In the investigated group no difference was found in theclinical picture in relation to the triggering infection.The presence of HLA-B27 antigen did notdiffer significantly in relation to the causal infection and treatment did not differ significantly inrelation to the triggering infection.Comparison of treatment of the investigated group withrecommendations in the literature revealed certain deviations from procedures recommended inthe literature.The patients were treated with antibiotics even in case of postenteric reactivearthritis (35.7 %)which is not consistent with recommendations in the literature.The majority ofpatients was treated with sulfasalazine (74.2 %).Conclusion .Sulfasalazine treatment should be usedonly in a protracted course of reactive arthritis,therefore the authors assume that the importanceof sulfasalazine treatment in the described group was overestimated.

Key words:
reactive arthritis,demographic data,clinical picture,therapy