Abstract

Background: Rheumatoid arthritis is one of the most impactful arthropathies due to its ability to induce permanent joint damage and cause variable-degree functional disability that decreases the patient’s life expectancy. Objective: This paper was contributed to assess and analyse the clinical outcomes of patients with rheumatic diseases and its impact on their quality of life and satisfaction rate with treatment. Patients and methods: We recruited 80 patients with rheumatic disease who were collected from different hospitals in Iraq for a period between March 6, 2022, and October 15, 2023. The clinical data included the duration of the disease and diagnoses of the disease by ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, and CT scan. All patients were subject to taking medications and were divided into three categories. Where the first category included non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), which included 30 patients; disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs), which included 26 patients; and corticosteroids, which included 24 patients. We also determined the degree of disease activity, ranging from 0 to 10, where zero represents the worst degree of disease activity and 10 represents the highest degree of disease activity, the level of pain and functional status in patients suffering from rheumatic disease through the Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) scale and the quality of life of patients during the follow-up period. Results: We enrolled clinical findings of patients where the most prevalent symptoms included joint pain with 19 cases, fatigue with 14 cases, swelling with 11 cases, fever with 11 cases, and the rate of patients have comorbidities was 60%, the most causes shown that environmental factors with 15 cases, poor diet with 20 cases, genetics with 22 cases, types of rheumatic diseases have prevalence into patients which contain rheumatoid arthritis got 45 cases. We conducted activity disease that found that low was 10 cases, moderate was 25 cases, high was 43 cases, which aspect of after medications used where remission was 64 cases, low was 10 cases, moderate was 4 cases, high was 2 cases. For pain scores of patients with rheumatic disease, 1st month was 4.83 ± 1.02, 2nd month was 2.51 ± 0.12, 3rd month was 1.32 ± 0.01, where satisfaction level of patents on medications efficiency included excellent have 68 cases, good have 7 cases, fear have 3 cases, and poor have 2 cases. Conclusion: The current study indicated the effect of treatments in the management of rheumatic disease, which caused an improvement in the functional status, development of physical activity, and quality of life of patients