Rheumatology Advance Access published online on December 20, 2007
Rheumatology, doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kem334
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Editorial |
Arterial elasticity: asset or liability?
Academic Unit of Musculoskeletal Disease, University of Leeds, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to: H. A. Bird, Professor of Pharmacological Rheumatology, Musculoskeletal Medicine, Chapel Allerton Hospital, Chapeltown Road, Leeds LS7 4SA, UK. E-mail: howard.bird@leedsth.nhs.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
That inflammatory polyarthritis and cardiovascular disease are closely related is now undoubted. Even with myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure as surrogates of molecular change, there is a significantly higher frequency of cardiovascular disease in RA compared with age- and sex-matched control individuals [1, 2]. The late John Cosh, in his time the only rheumatologist to hold a joint appointment with cardiology, followed his cohort of 100 patients with RA, recruited upon his appointment, for over 25 yrs to provide prospective confirmation that between one-third and one-half of all RA-related deaths are directly attributable to cardiovascular disease [3]. This was in a cohort of patients not specifically selected for vasculitic features, might have caused this proportion to climb even higher. Collaboration with other disciplines has continued, to the benefit of rheumatology. A striking recent collaboration is the joint funding by the Arthritis Research Campaign and