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Rheumatology Advance Access originally published online on October 12, 2004
Rheumatology 2004 43(12):1465-1467; doi:10.1093/rheumatology/keh424
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Rheumatology Vol. 43 No. 12 © British Society for Rheumatology 2004; all rights reserved

EDITORIAL

The measure of our measures

M. Harth and J. Pope

Arthritis Institute, St Joseph's Health Care and Department of Medicine, University of Western Ontario, P.O. Box 5777, 268 Grosvenor St., London, ON N6A 4V2, Canada

Correspondence to: M. Harth. E-mail: manfred.harth@sjhc.london.on.ca

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Attempts to quantify various aspects of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) go back at least as far as the first half of the last century [1]. The importance of separating ‘disease activity’ from function and structural damage became increasingly clear especially with the advent of new disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) and biological agents and the need to assess their efficacy in clinical trials. The question as to which measures of disease activity one should select is a vexing one. Should it be joint tenderness or pain, morning stiffness, joint swelling, range of movement, function? Should extra-articular manifestations such as fatigue be included? Should one add laboratory values such as the erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) or the C-reactive protein (CRP)? Should such measures be reported separately, or should summation be attempted? The last question was particularly important since therapeutic trials frequently reported multiple outcomes of uncertain relative importance, often differing from . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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