| Summary: | Psoriatic arthritis causes inflammation and pain in joints and entheses. It is closely linked to the skin disease psoriasis as its name suggests. Over the past decade the number of published research papers on psoriatic arthritis has grown rapidly, and some of those studies have been performed in Iceland. The goal of this study was to find most or all patients in Iceland with previously diagnosed psoriatic arthritis to study the prevalence, clinical presentation, inheritance, and the possible relationship between nail changes and other clinical symptoms. Although cases were sought from all of Iceland, only those living in the Reykjavik area were included in prevalence estimates. All patients were invited for a physical examination. Information on psoriasis patients collected for previous studies was used to find patients with psoriatic arthritis, and a search of the records of Landspitali hospital was performed as well. Data on psoriatic arthritis patients collected for this study were compared to data previously collected on psoriasis patients to analyze the connection between nail changes and clinical symptoms in psoriatic arthritis. Information on 346 individuals with diagnosed psoriatic arthritis was found, of whom 301 were alive in 2003, with 220 living in the Reykjavik area; 71% of them participated in the physical examination portion of the study. Information on 1116 psoriasis patients was available for comparison. The prevalence of diagnosed psoriatic arthritis was 0.16%, but 0.14% when the proportion of individuals without confirmable disease at examination was taken into account. Nearly twice as many women as men had the disease. Family members of psoriatic arthritis patients had a relative risk (RR) of 39.2, 12.2, 3.6, and 2.6 for having the disease for first- to fourth degree relatives (p<0.0001). Nail changes were more common in psoriatic arthritis than psoriasis and only onycholysis was clinically important in psoriatic arthritis, with an odds ratio (OR) of 2.1 for developing arthritis among ...
|
|---|