As the overall goal of rheumatoid arthritis therapy is to prevent disease progression and joint damage, pain management is an essential routine practice for patients to maximize their quality of life. Yoshii I et al. in their study described that the Health Assessment Questionnaire Disability Index (HAQ-DI) and 28-joint Disease Activity Score (DAS28) affects the factors like DAS28-CRP, age and SvdHS to correlate with the visual analog scale (PS-VAS).

Pain is severe burden for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients. But, the effect on the Health Assessment Questionnaire Disability Index (HAQ-DI) and 28-joint Disease Activity Score (DAS28) was to be evaluated thus this study aimed to examine them in a case series.

A total of 384 patients who were treated for more than 5 years were studied. The parameters investigated comprised of the HAQ-DI score, average value of the DAS28 with C-reactive protein (DAS28-CRP), Sharp/van der Heijde Score (SvdHS), age, and the pain score calculated by a PS-VAS. Relationships among these factors and relationships between the HAQ-DI score and the other factors, and between the change in HAQ-DI scores and changes in other factors were evaluated statistically using the multivariate linear regression analysis. The effect of PS-VAS on HAQ-DI was compared with that of DAS28-CRP on the overlapping data of each parameter.

HAQ-DI revealed significant positive correlations with all the parameters. However, PS-VAS demonstrated a stronger effect than DAS28-CRP, also confirmed without overlapping data. After curtailing the impact of DAS28-CRP, age and SvdHS, there was a significant correlation between HAQ-DI and PS-VAS in all the analyses. The change in HAQ-DI demonstrated a significant association with the change in PS-VAS.

The results portrayed that PS-VAS profoundly influences HAQ-DI. The effect of DAS28-CRP overlapped with the impact of PS-VAS in a significant way. The pain control for RA patients is the most critical factor contributing to activities of daily living, as well as disease activity control.