Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a disease that causes chronic inflammatory of
the joints, which may lead to depressive mood for the patients. However, no research on the issues
regarding depression among Asian RA patients has been conducted. The study aimed to explore
the incidence of depression among Taiwanese RA patients.
Methods: All subjects were extracted from Longitudinal Health Insurance Database 2000, which
was a subset of the National Health Insurance Research Database and contained all medical claims
data for one million beneficiaries. Study cohort was comprised of the patients who had received a
newly diagnosis of RA from 2000 to 2003. Controls were randomly selected from the remaining
cases at a ratio of 1:2 frequency matched by age and sex. All subjects were followed up until the
end of 2010, and were estimated the incidence rate with Cox proportional-hazard regression.
Results: We found the incidence rate of depression were 2.69 per 1000 person-years of follow-up
in RA cases and 1.70 per 1000 person-years in controls. In other words, RA cases had a 1.56-fold
increasing risk in depression as compared to general population.
Conclusions: Regularly surveyed for psychiatric symptoms, especially for those younger RA patients,
during medical consultation was recommended.
