If I Have Rheumatoid Arthritis, Will I Need Joints Replaced? (1:10)
Joint replacement surgeries for rheumatoid arthritis patients have actually declined, due to better medicines that preserve the joints, explains W. Hayes Wilson, MD, chief of rheumatology at Piedmont Hospital.
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absolutely not. As a matter of fact, if you talk to my friends who, of course I have a lot of friends who are orthopedics, who replace joints, and I like to say they clean up our messes perhaps. They take care of our failures. They will tell you that there are less, much less joint replacements these days now that we have better medicines particularly the biologic response modifiers, because we preserve the joints now, they don't get worn out like they used to.
So they do less joint replacement surgery for rheumatoid arthritis than they do, for instance, for osteoarthritis wear and tear, because you really, we don't have a good medicine to stop that, people are going to get older and people are going to wear out their joints and so they still need joint replacements much less likely in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, with inflammatory arthritis because our treatments are so much better.
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that causes joint inflammation and triggers pain, swelling, fatigue and other symptoms. Find out how to treat and manage rheumatoid arthritis flare-ups.
