Loading...
The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and the European League Against Rheumatism have collaboratively developed new classification criteria for rheumatoid arthritis (RA); the ACR's previous criteria were published in 1987.
First, a working group analyzed data from several large cohorts of patients with early synovitis to determine predictors of eventual requisite disease-modifying therapy with disease-modifying drugs. Second, 24 RA experts used a consensus-based decision-analytic approach to reach agreement on key predictors of RA. Both sources of information were used to construct the new classification system, which can be applied to patients who have at least one joint with clinical synovitis that is not explained better by another d…