Women with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) are more likely to have abnormal body fat distribution, especially those with a normal weight, compared with men with RA or women without the disease.
Women with RA are also more likely to experience loss of muscle mass -- what doctors call sarcopenia - as well as increasing abdominal body fat combined with decreasing muscle mass -- a phenomenon known as sarcopenic obesity.
These are the findings of Dr. Jon T. Giles at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland and colleagues, who studied body composition of 189 men and women with RA and 189 controls matched for age and gender.
Tests showed that the women with RA were significantly more likely to have sarcopenia, have excess fat and have sarcopenic obesity. This was not seen among men with RA or the controls.
Differences in body composition were greatest for patients with normal weight and normal body mass index -- an accepted means of determining how fat or thin a person is.
Abnormal body composition was significantly related to a number of factors including an increasing number of deformed joints, higher levels of disability, elevated levels of the inflammatory protein CRP, and lack of treatment with "disease-modifying" anti-RA drugs, according to the researchers.
Abnormal body fat distribution is "over-represented in patients with RA, particularly in those in the normal weight BMI range," the investigators conclude, and RA-associated disease and treatment characteristics contribute to this increase in abnormal body composition.
Because abnormal body composition is "increasingly implicated as a key determinant of health," further investigation is needed to determine what causes body composition changes and to devise and test interventional strategies to reduce their effects on health outcomes in patients with RA, Giles and colleagues say.
SOURCE: Arthritis & Rheumatism (Arthritis Care and Research), June 2008.
Oh great. Another downside of this disease. Thanks Lynn.Sure sure they had to do a study to tell us you get fat around the middle when all the joints in your limbs hurt, are stiff, and lack range of motion. Of course muscle mass disappears - we are not moving as often as the normals. Common sense isn't it?