Rheumatoid Arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a form of arthritis that causes pain, swelling, stiffness and loss of function in your joints. Rheumatoid arthritis is two to three times more common in women than in men and generally strikes between the ages of 20 and 50. Rheumatoid arthritis is different from osteoarthritis, the common arthritis that often comes with older age.Rheumatoid arthritis causes joint pain and swelling, redness, warmth and can affect other organs of the body like skin, eyes, lungs, heart, blood, nerves or kidneys. Rheumatoid arthritis affects approximately 1% of the population, in which 75% of those diagnosed are women. The exact cause of rheumatoid arthritis is unknown, but scientists attribute this disease to a combination of genetic, environmental and hormonal factors.The symptoms that distinguish rheumatoid arthritis from other forms of arthritis are inflammation and soft-tissue swelling of many joints at the same time. Thus, the pain of rheumatoid arthritis is usually worse in the morning compared to the classic pain of osteoarthritis where the pain worsens over the day as the joints are used. It is 4 times more common in smokers than non-smokers. More than two million people in the United States are affected by rheumatoid arthritis. This disease is three times more common in women than in men.No one is positive on the exact cause of why people get rheumatoid arthritis, but many scientists believe there are a lot of common factors among the people that suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. Hereditary and genetics is a major contribution to the onset of rheumatoid arthritis, the particular genes that are passed from one family member to next.It is suspected that susceptibility to rheumatoid arthritis is an inherited trait. The exact cause of rheumatoid arthritis is unknown, but it's believed to be the body's immune system attacking the tissue that lines your joints. But rheumatoid arthritis can also affect young children and adults older than age 50.
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