Abstract
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is characterized by autoimmune chronic joint inflammation, which is worsened by mechanical stress. It is still inconclusive whether joints on the right side or the dominant side get more damaged in RA since the limited number of patients analyzed in the previous study had made it difficult to separately analyze right-handed and left-handed patients. Here, we enrolled 334 RA patients, the biggest number of patients in studies to address this issue and separately analyzed right-handed and left-handed patients. As a result, we observed that joints on the dominant side got clinically and radiologically more involved in the right-handed patients (p ≤ 0.0030). Importantly, this tendency was also seen in the left-handed patients, while it was not statistically significant due to the small sample size. This tendency was observed in each component of clinical or radiological involvement. Thus, handedness influences the laterality of clinical and radiological joint involvement in RA.
Highlights
In the Larsen method, the wrist is considered as one unit and the score for the wrist is multiplied by five5,6. modified Total Sharp Score (mTSS) provides separate scores for erosion and for JSN, whereas the Larsen method includes both erosions and joint space narrowing in each joint as a single score
To confirm the primary aim of this study, we at first searched for previous reports which addressed the relationship between handedness and joint involvement of Rheumatoid arthritis (RA)
We evaluated the laterality of the daily disease activity using Disease Activity Score-28 (DAS28) and its components swollen joint count (SJC) and tender joint count (TJC)
Summary
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is characterized by autoimmune chronic joint inflammation, which is worsened by mechanical stress It is still inconclusive whether joints on the right side or the dominant side get more damaged in RA since the limited number of patients analyzed in the previous study had made it difficult to separately analyze right-handed and left-handed patients. We observed that joints on the dominant side got clinically and radiologically more involved in the right-handed patients (p ≤ 0.0030) This tendency was seen in the left-handed patients, while it was not statistically significant due to the small sample size. This tendency was observed in each component of clinical or radiological involvement. Peter Lee et al (1974) compared RA patients between out-patient treatment group and in-patient www.nature.com/scientificreports/
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