Article Text
Abstract
Background/purpose Cardiovascular (CV) risk, cancer, infections and osteoporosis should be screened for in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The objective was to assess 3-year effects of a nurse visit for comorbidity counselling.
Methods This was an open long-term (3 years) extension of the Comorbidities and Education in Rheumatoid Arthritis 6-month randomised controlled trial in which patients with definite, stable RA were visiting a nurse for comorbidity counselling. Comorbidity status was assessed and nurses provided advice on screening and management, at baseline and 3 years later. A score was developed to quantify comorbidity screening and management: 0–100, where lower scores indicate better screening and management. The score was compared between baseline and 3-year assessment using a Wilcoxon test for paired data.
Results Of the 970 recruited patients, 776 (80%) were followed-up at 2–4 years and 769 (79%) had available data for comorbidities at both time points: mean (±SD) age 58 (±11) years and mean disease duration 14 (±10) years; 614 (80%) were women, the mean Disease Activity Score 28 was 3.0±1.3, and 538 (70%) were receiving a biologic. At baseline, the mean comorbidity screening score was 36.6 (±19.9) and it improved at 3 years to 24.3 (±17.8) (p<0.0001), thus with a relative improvement of 33% (improvement of 12 points). CV risk screening, vaccination status and bone densitometry performance improved the most.
Conclusions Comorbidity screening was suboptimal but improved notably over 3 years, after a nurse-led programme aiming at checking systematically for comorbidity screening and giving patient advice. This long-term efficacy pleads in favour of nurse-led interventions to better address comorbidities in RA.
Trial registration number NCT01315652
- rheumatoid arthritis
- cardiovascular disease
- nursing
- vaccination
- multidisciplinary team care
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Footnotes
Contributors All the authors except F Foissac, statistician, have provided data for the study; all the authors have participated in the data interpretation and have approved the final version.
Funding The initial COMEDRA trial was supported by the Roche France and a grant from the French National Research Program. This follow-up study was supported by a research grant from the French Ministry of Health (PHRC AOM 12072) and sponsored by the Département de la Recherche Clinique et du Développement del'Assistance Publique—Hôpitaux de Paris.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval The study was approved by the French institutional review board, file #8-14 (ID RCB 2014-A00102-45).
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data may be obtained from a third party and are not publicly available.