Research Paper - Archives of General Internal Medicine (2018) Volume 2, Issue 3

Dietary restrictions in rheumatoid arthritis-what the patient?s feel: A questionnaire based study.

Background: There is increasing evidence for the role of diet in the etiopathogenesis of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) while it is not clear how it modifies the disease activity in view of inconclusive results of various dietary intervention studies. We intend to study the influence of diet on RA patients by a simple questionnaire.

Methods and findings: Descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out among 101 consecutive RA patients with simple questionnaire and analysed whether they had dietary restriction or not and how it affected their symptoms. There were 44 patients who restricted their diet and 57 who did not observe dietary restriction. Of the 44 dietary restrictors, 20 (44.5%) had reported worsening of joint pains after a particular food while 52 out of 57 non dietary restrictors (91.2%) did not feel a difference in the joint symptoms with food intake which was statistically significant (p<0.0001). Just like patient reported disease outcome measures which are less complicated and time consuming has emerged as a promising tool in the disease management, this study also observed that majority of our patients are right in restricting their diet based on their joint symptoms.

Conclusion: The patient has to decide on their own basis whether or not to restrict a particular food item based on their symptoms instead of imposing a specific dietary pattern until we get more evidence to prove the contrary.

Author(s): Velammal Petchiappan, Preethi Priyadarshini, Naga Prabhu VN

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