Essay On Rheumatoid Arthritis

"Rheumatoid joint inflammation is an interminable infection set apart by irritation of the joints, frequently influencing the hand joints and both sides of the body in the meantime" (Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, 2009).

Rheumatoid Arthritis or “RA” is an autoimmune disorder where the immune system mistakenly attacks its own body tissues. This disease affects the lining of joints causing pain and swelling. Eventually the swelling can lead to bone erosion and joint deformity. RA can happen to anyone at any age, but the majority of people who have to endure this disease are women over the age of 40.

     Another type is Rheumatoid arthritis. It is what’s known as an inflammatory arthritis. It is the second most common form of arthritis, right behind osteoarthritis. It affects primarily the small joints in the hands and feet, causing crippling deformities. This is an arthritis that usually starts in middle-life or earlier. Estimates say one out of every hundred people, (females are two to three times as likely) suffer from it. It usually starts in the winter and after a common sickness, but it isn’t considered an infective arthritis. Nobody knows what causes rheumatoid arthritis. It could be some hereditary trait. Scientists think that rheumatoid arthritis may be an autoimmune disease (that means the body acts as though it were allergic to itself). The immune system gets mixed up and attacks normal joint tissue instead of the infection it is supposed to attack.

As I began my sophomore year of high school, I envisioned another year full of sports and normal high school activities. I was looking forward to playing basketball as I had done in my freshman year. A few weeks into the new school year I slowly realized that vision would not play out how I thought it would. When I began to notice a nagging pain in my hands and fingers that would not go away, I knew something was wrong. Basketball, a sport that I had once loved to play became almost impossible for my swollen hands to handle. The pain progressively got worse and eventually spread throughout my body, making it difficult to walk and carry out simple tasks. After two long months of tests and several doctors, I was finally diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease that causes chronic inflammation of the joints. While inflammation of the tissue around the joints and inflammatory arthritis are characteristic features of rheumatoid arthritis, the disease can also cause inflammation and injury in other organs in the

Arthritis occurs when the body incorrectly identifies its own tissue as foreign matter and attacks it. Arthritis includes a set of more than eighty autoimmune diseases. Arthritis attacks connective tissues and joints. It causes stiffness, pain, inflammation, and swelling of the joints. Some kinds are crippling, but rarely leads to death. There are many different

Rhematoid Arthritis – Is an autoimmune disease which can cause chronic inflammation of body`s organs, joints, and the surrounding tissue of the joints. It can

Rheumatoid Arthritis(RA) is the most common type of autoimmune arthritis. RA is a progressive and debilitating musculoskeletal disorder that affects the joints symmetrically, causing a range of systemic effects. What it causes is still not well known; nevertheless, findings of new research points towards a believe that it is triggered by a defective immune system, which causes the release of inflammatory chemicals. These chemicals cause damage to cartilage and bone, usually affecting the wrists, the joints of the hand, including the knuckles, the middle joints of the fingers and feet. While this condition can affect any joints, besides, important body organs such as the eyes and the lungs can also be affected by the inflammation that occurs as a result of this chronic condition. Only in America 1.3 million of people are affected by this ailment, and 75 % of them are mainly women. Its onset usually occurs between fourth and sixth decades; however, RA can occur at any age("Diseases And

Rheumatoid arthritis is one of the incurable diseases and turns chronic with progressive inflammatory of the synovial lining of peripheral joins. It is characterized by symmetric, chronic, and deforming polyatrhitis that causes long term joint disability when not controlled early. Considering there is no cure for this disease, management focuses on pain and inflammation reduction in order to prevent destruction of joints while at the same time preserving and improving on the functionality of the patient (Varatharajan et al, 2009).

There are various drugs to treat RA and can be divided into four different classes. These classes are nonsteroidal

Rheumatoid Arthritis or (RA) is an autoimmune disease that attacks the joints and connective tissue. The result is inflammation that produces permanent damage in the joints. Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic syndrome that tends to be progressive and destructive as compared to Osteoarthritis or (OA), which is more of an age related disease caused by “wear and tear” of the joints. In contrast to (OA), rheumatoid arthritis is characterized by inflammation mostly of the joints, but is a general body disease.

The immune system helps protect the body from foreign substances and infections that could potentially harm it. One byproduct of the immune system that can cause Arthritis is the inflammatory process. “Two important components of the immune system that play a role in the inflammation associated with rheumatoid arthritis are B and T cells, both of which belong to a family of immune cells called lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell” (Maryland). The T and B cells flow in the bloodstream searching for substances that are not part of the body. If the T cell notices a foreign substance it will secrete a chemical that allows the B cells to release protein to the area with the foreign substance. These proteins fight against the virus and rid it

Arthritis is an inflammation of the joint(s). There are tons of different types of arthritis, but the two most common types include; osteoarthritis, and rheumatoid arthritis. Osteoarthritis is common when an infection or an injury occurs to the joints, which can then breakdown cartilage tissue. Rheumatoid arthritis is considered an autoimmune disorder. This happens when your immune system attacks the tissue of the body. You can tell if you have some type of arthritis if you have pain, swelling, and stiffness in the joints. Sometimes you can see redness on the skin around the joint. My grandma has arthritis and I can sometimes see the redness around her joints, and her fingers become very swollen and stiff

Synovial macrophages and fibroblast-like synoviocytes increase in number and infiltrate the surrounding cartilage and bone; these cells are the primary source of inflammatory mediators, involving proinflammatory cytokines, chemokines, and adhesion molecules. The cytokine tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF alpha) is present in the RA synovium, and so anti-TNF alpha therapy has proved to be effective in controlling disease progression in many RA patients (76).

The RA disease development is linked with many pro-inflammatory factors 1-2. Cytokines such as IL-1, IL-6 and TNF-α played important roles in inflammatory development on diseases site2, therefore, clinically, suppressing the activity of these factors on synovial cells is the main strategy for most RA treatment methods. The suppression can be achieved externally by drug management. The recent development of gene therapy studies on RA, in addition, has opened up a new therapeutic approach via genetic modification. The principle of RA gene therapy is to use a vector to insert a receptor antagonise gene or an antisense gene of pro-inflammatory factors in synovial fibroblast cells, which is then