The Diagnosis of SLE in a Patient with Polyarthralgia -A case report-

Abstract

The systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a multisystemic disease which primarily affects young females and is caused by tissue damage due to antibody and complement-fixing immune complex deposition. It has a wide spectrum of clinical presentations. The most common initial symptoms of SLE show cutaneous, musculoskeletal, renal, and hematological involvement. Despite advances in the diagnostic and serologic testing for SLE, the interval between symptom onset and diagnosis is protracted. Arthritis and/or arthralgia are the most common initial symptoms in SLE patients, but the diagnosis of patients with these symptoms is no more rapid than in patients without. The cause of this may be that joint involvement is relatively mild and deformity is rare in SLE. Therefore, patients presenting with symptoms of arthritis and/or arthralgia should be evaluated for SLE carefully, so that SLE can be diagnosed earlier, and morbidity and mortality can be reduced. We describe the case of a patients eventually diagnosed as SLE after several visits of our pain clinic, who showed the initial symptoms of SLE with polyarticular joint pain.