Demographic features of patients with rheumatoid arthritis in kosovo.

INTRODUCTION: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune inflammatory illness characterized by polyarthritis of small and large joints which in the course of time may progress to disability.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: In our prospective study were included 951 patients (females 730, and males 221 respectively) with an average age 51.3 year old, diagnosed with RA in accordance with ACR-EULAR/2010 criteria. The purpose of the paper is to investigate gender, age, group age by gender, level of education, residing place, nationality, religion, social condition, marital status, and vocation in our patients. Statistical processing has been carried out with program SPSS 20.0, SigmaStat 2.03, SigmaPlot 2000, MedCalc and Excel 2010. Most present group age was 40 - 49 year old with difference in distribution based on gender.

RESULTS: The largest number of them had completed secondary education, most of them originated from rural areas, were farmers by vocation and housewives. The database created by this survey can serve for building the RA patients' national registry. This registry can serve for further researches and planning the management of RA as a systemic rheumatic disease that has an immense social, economic and health impact. Largest portion of RA patients were farmers and housewives respectively (38% and 32.2% respectively). Vocations such as: retail sellers, workers in administration, education, factory, maintenance, and artisan workers had similar incidence in both genders that ranged from 9.7% to 6.2%, whereas these vocations among males ranged from 11.3% to 2.7%.